What is Peripheral about Peripheral Modernisms?

The manifold question of my title. Does peripheral refer mainly to place (Where)? Time (When)? Content (What)? Form (How)? Ideology (On Which Side?) Or is it a question of relevance, impact, and world circulation? As early as 1960, Harry Levin’s famous question (‘What Was Modernism?’) ended up identifying, from the point of view of comparative literature and the other arts, what in retrospect, and in view of the current terminology, cannot but be considered core or central modernism. Curiously enough, some of Levin’s core, or canonical, modernists were exiles or expatriates from what Immanuel Wallerstein would later call the semiperiphery, if not from the periphery itself. Several years ago, I wrote about Fernando Pessoa as the inventor of the semiperiphery. Is semiperipheral modernisms a useful concept as well? I wonder. More recent questions about modernism focus either on time (as the ‘was’ in Levin’s title already implies) or on space (as the many geographies of modernism that have been traced since suggest). If we bring in subject matter (what), form/aesthetics (how), and ideology (on which side), we may end up concluding that there is nothing peripheral about what has been named ‘peripheral modernisms’.