Discussing Kafka’s The Trial, Fredric Jameson makes the argument that “the resistance of archaic feudal structures to irresistible modernizing tendencies…is the condition of possibility for high modernism as such.” This seminar recuperates Jameson’s formulation of modernism as a by-product of incomplete modernization to interrogate the relationship between the global reach of the capitalist mode of production and the combined and uneven development of modernism as a literary mode. This seminar aims to bring into focus the contribution of peripheral aesthetics to a world history of modernism. In particular, we aim to highlight the infrastructural dimensionality of peripheral literatures, their registration, both at the level of content and form, of the territorial patterns and economic networks that have shaped capitalist modernity and its industrial and environmental cycles.

How do formal patterns construct a situated perspective on the uneven configurations of global capitalism? How do peripheral literatures register, model, and think the historical and material configurations of the world system? What would it mean to think peripheral modernism infrastructurally? How do peripheral artworks distribute the geographical arrangements of the world system? How does peripheral aesthetics register the uneven and combined development of the world economy? We welcome papers that explore the worldly orientations of peripheral literatures and that reimagine modernist praxis across the Global South as world-building activity. We invite submissions that explore these topics from different peripheral positions and time periods.

Potential topics:

• combined and uneven development
• dependency and underdevelopment
• global/peripheral modernism
• internationalism
• literary geographies
• literature/aesthetics and politics
• modernization/modernity/modernism
• scale
• urbanization, industrialization, rural-urban migration
• world literature