CFP
CLCWeb Special Issue: The Peripheral Jameson
“Always Totalize,” as Clint Burnham notes, could be one of the mottos of Fredric Jameson’s work: a commitment to drawing—always partial—connections between seemingly disparate fragments of reality into a contradictory unity, one that is never fully present. But how are we to make sense of totalization in the periphery of capitalism? This periphery is where the totality of global capitalism is more readily intuited, to draw on another argument by Jameson. Thus, one could argue that peripheral contexts are where the act of totalization more directly confronts totality itself.
This issue seeks to interrogate the significance of Jameson’s work outside the American and Western-European contexts, asking how it might help explain phenomena in the periphery of the capitalist world system; or, conversely, how might the latter rewrite Jameson’s elaborations.
This overarching question generates multiple lines of inquiry. One of which, for example, has to do with the relationship of geopolitics, and politics, to totalization. Reflecting on Jameson’s schematization in The Political Unconscious, we can ask: was the political ever truly unconscious in the periphery? How might the older debate around Jameson’s notion of national allegory be updated, given neo-imperialist realities and decolonial theorizations? With the decline of the US and Europe, how is the practice of totalization—literary and critical—reshaped in the periphery? And if, according to Jameson, the capitalist totality can be intuited in art and culture, does it do so similarly today inside and outside the capitalist core?
Another set of questions is related to the notion of postmodernity and periodization, central to Jameson’s reflections on totality. How does Jameson’s insistence that modernity is singular, rather than plural, affect the way one periodizes culture on the periphery, given its singular trajectories in different peripheral situations? In what ways can recent discussions of peripheral realism, modernism, and postmodernism be brought into dialogue with Jamesonian periodization? How do the history of certain genres in the periphery surprisingly affirm—or push back against—Jameson’s reflections on genre histories, such as Science Fiction or the Utopian novel?
Yet another set of questions directly engages with methodology or theory. For example, how can Jameson’s four-fold allegorical model be actualized in peripheral cultural contexts? What models of dialectical interpretations that rise out of peripheral contexts have in common with the Jamesonian “method,” if such method exists? How does Jameson’s work on the novel in the age of globalization relate to other theorizations of world literature, which necessarily address peripheral and semiperipheral realities? If, for Jameson, culture’s mode of generating knowledge resides today less in its documentary aspect or in its overt engagement with ideology, but in the “content of form” of art—that historical transformations of artistic form and its contradictions—how can other theoretical accounts of art at the periphery be brought into dialogue with it?
This special issue of CLCWeb, honoring the great North American critic, invites scholars who engage cultural contexts outside the American and Western-European to reflect on Jameson’s work. Contributions are welcome in the form of essays, articles, interviews, and other genres. Comparative approaches to other thinkers are also welcome. Contributions must be original and can address, among other topics:
- Reflections on Jameson’s work from peripheral perspectives;
- The reception of Jameson’s work in specific peripheral and semi-peripheral contexts;
- Peripheral realism, modernism, and postmodernism;
- New considerations on the Jameson-Ahmad debate;
- The relation of local realities to historical totality;
- Dialectical interpretation in peripheral contexts and its relation to Jameson work;
- Jamesonian allegory and the Greimassian rectangle in the periphery;
- Totality and totalization in peripheral situations;
- Genre, historicity, and periodization in the periphery.
Please submit an abstract of around 300 words and a short bio (around 100 words) by January 5th 2025 to the guest editors (use the subject heading “CLCWeb Special Issue Peripheral Jameson” in your e-mail) directly to the issue guest editors:
Fabio Akcelrud Durão: fadurao@unicamp.br
Lucas Rodrigues Negri: rodriguesnegri@gmail.com
Authors whose submissions will be selected for publication will be notified by February 1, 2025. Full submission should be 6,000 – 12,000 words in length (inclusive of notes and bibliography).