This course will be addressed particularly to students of world literature, postcolonial studies, and European modernism.
We are not especially interested in the specific Soviet or Chinese policies on the arts that came to be known as "socialist realism." Instead, our intention is to ask whether there is something like a peripheral aesthetic - which is to say, a set of formal properties that seem to recur in non-Western settings because they capture the experience of dependency, uneven development, the clash of alien cultural values, economic disenfranchisement, and decolonization. We wonder whether such an aesthetic - if it exists - is not drawn to or reassembled out of the fragments of a "realism" that is at times socialist, at others merely socially critical, but no less modernist (in the sense of fresh, inventive, current). And we seek to expand significantly the definition of socialist realism to explore whether it is a genuinely popular sensibility and not only a bureaucratically imposed policy of the arts.
These sorts of questions take place within a frame that we should foreground. The theory within which we have all been trained - the theory that defines the entire post-war period, in fact -- is itself profoundly modernist, and takes its philosophical gestures from the very figures of modernist literary texts. For that reason, high canonical modernism (1850-1940) is uniquely defined in most of our minds with positive "newness": with avant-garde practices, formal experimentation, cultural transgressions, and a linguistic depth-model. This is the very definition of "modernist" for most scholars, in fact, and it deeply colors and in some ways distorts earlier attempts to speak of a peripheral aesthetic. We are questioning the part of this assumption that considers this ensemble to be unique, and are skeptical about whether the differences among these variouys modes have to do with degrees of experimentation or linguistic sophistication.
The early decades of the 20th century saw a collision between aesthetic transgression and artistic alienation (classic modernism, in short) and liberationist movements that set out actually to transform bourgeois life. These movements not only sought to invent a counter-aesthetic appropriate to the new reality, but did so in the very specific context of a world revolution against empire. These movements - even on the continent of Europe itself - were made up of intellectuals and artists from all over the global periphery, including of course the Eastern periphery of Europe where most of the avant-gardes originated.