Primitivism in the Peripheries: Reflections on Auritro Majumder’s Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery

Abstract

AuritroMajumder’s Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery opens important critical space for rethinking world literature in the context of the internationalist tendencies, politics, and practices that have both produced and nurtured it throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In particular, Majumder’s interest in the intellectual ferment in the peripheries of global empires speaks to a burgeoning interest in the aesthetics of peripheral internationalism as well as the politics that it was a response to. To this growing field,Majumder infuses a distinctively materialist perspective that draws on systemic readings of world literature that situate it within the capitalist world system, and the combined and uneven development generated by capitalism’s incursions into the world’s peripheries. As a small contribution to this forum on Insurgent Imaginations, I seek to explore the politics and aesthetics of a radical anticolonial primitivism as an important and particularly rich site from where to think about peripheral internationalism. I am, of course, prompted by Majumder’s suggestive and nuanced analyses of the writings of Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy on the predicament of tribals in contemporary India and the ways in which the writers’ formal innovations illuminate it.1 I therefore want to extend his discussion and