THE CASE FOR PERIPHERAL AESTHETICS: FREDRIC JAMESON, THE WORLD-SYSTEM AND CULTURES OF EMANCIPATION

Abstract

Since its 1986 publication, Fredric Jameson’s essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (TWL) has been widely perceived as the master theorist’s colossal misstep; postcolonial scholars, following the Indian Marxist Aijaz Ahmad, have criticized TWL as a singular intervention that exemplifies metropolitan parochialism about third-world peripheries. Breaking with such consensus, this essay offers a postcolonial–materialist defence of the essay’s two central, conceptual categories: national allegory and third-world/peripheral aesthetics. I demonstrate that their theoretical basis lies in the differential calibration of modernism, and the public–private ratio, in the peripheries of the capitalist world-system. These abstractions are in fact engendered by the unevenly universalizing tendencies of capital itself. The first part of the essay illustrates how a reconsideration of TWL is vital to current theories of world literature, which borrow much and often without acknowledgement from older materialist frameworks of combined and uneven development, dependency and world-system analysis. In the second half, I argue that key mid-twentieth-century cultural landmarks, such as Mao Zedong’s Yenan lectures on literature, and Glauber Rocha’s “Aesthetics of Hunger” cinema manifesto, foreshadow TWL’s argument. Not only do these texts from Asia, Latin America etc. illuminate the anti-imperial, peripheral “roots” of Jameson’s formulations, they also trace a largely forgotten history, and corpus, of peripheral modernism, differing in key aspects from Euro-American modernism. The essay highlights the key concern of peripheral aesthetics, namely that culture is a site of emancipatory struggle.