The postmodern periphery is often more creatively potent than the center

Evidence

It would be hard to think of sympathies less Eurocentric than these, or more congruent with Wollen’s concerns. In fact, the Zairois painters or Nigerian musicians with whom Raiding the Icebox concludes, creative devisers of a ‘para-tourist art’ inseparable from the effects of postmodern travel, teach the same lesson: that ‘the choice between an authentic nationalism and a homogenizing modernity will become more and more outmoded’. The final emphasis in both critics is the same: symptoms of sterility and provincialism in the metropolis, notations of imaginative renewal in the periphery. The postmodern may also signify this. ‘It is because in late capitalism and in its world system even the center is marginalized’, writes Jameson, that ‘expressions of the marginally uneven and unevenly developed issuing from a recent experience of capitalism are often more intense and powerful’, and ‘above all more deeply symptomatic and meaningful than anything the enfeebled center still finds itself able to say’. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 289

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The periphery-renewal thesis parallels the ‘trees as infrastructure’ piece’s argument that creative adaptation flourishes precisely where resources are constrained — same structural logic.
• XREF: connects to: The center-periphery axis no longer maps intellectual location — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 230; World literature trades unequally between a dominant center and periphery; Modern place is a local expression of distant, disembedded relations — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 260 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• World literature trades unequally between a dominant center and periphery #complicates (0.85)
• The center-periphery axis no longer maps intellectual location #expands (0.80) — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 230
• Exilic and comprador intellectuals both traffic dialectically between center and periphery #expands (0.80) — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 222
• Modern place is a local expression of distant, disembedded relations #complicates (0.75) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 260