A Departure from Modernism: Stylistic Strategies in Modern Peripheral Literatures as Symptom, Mediation and Critique of Modernity

Starting from a poignant survey of the most important recent critical reappraisals of Modernism which broadened its formation and its temporalities as a capitalist, non-western, pre-globalizing transnational phenomenon, the chapter appraises the category of periphery as an element of the formation of capitalism, rather than a matter of cultural hierarchy, referring to the most important Marxist theorists who debated the relationship between capitalism across different socio-economic chronological frames. Emphasizing the nature of modernity as a temporal condition, the essay considers its relation to capitalism as global and yet extremely varied, and mentions attempts to disentangle modernity from Modernism and to challenge the oppositions between realism and modernism. Following Adorno’s critique of Lukács, the anti-realism of modernism is explored, suggesting that both should be acknowledged as permeable modes. In the last section, Marxist critic Michael Löwy’s notion of critical ‘irrealism’ and Timothy Brennan’s ‘homiletic realism’ are referred with regard to a postcolonial literature which is both intensely imaginative, formally and stylistically complex, and alert to a critique of social reality, as demonstrated in the reading of ‘Xala’ (1974), a novella by the Senegalese writer and film-maker Ousmane Sembéne.