Comparing Centres, Comparing Peripheries: Introduction

This issue presents some of the most innovative and inspiring contributions to ‘Comparing Centres, Comparing Peripheries’, a 2012 British Comparative Literature Association postgraduate conference. 1 Since the title of the preceding postgraduate BCLA event, ‘Comparison Beyond the West’, may have appeared geographically prescriptive and polarizing, we sought keywords that would be inclusive, dynamic and with a critical edge. The terms ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’, and the invitation to compare, did the trick: the event attracted forty speakers from various disciplinary backgrounds, who discussed a plethora of languages,regionsandphenomena.Somespeakersconjuredcomparisons claiming ‘the centre’ as the all-important yardstick; others privileged peripheral traffic, circumventing the centre; others scrutinized the scope and usage of the very terms ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. Magnetic and multifaceted, ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ served us well as title keywords and it is around them that this issue is loosely based. Literary scholars have long used the words in their general meaning and we are acutely aware that the general usage escapes a succinct summary. In this brief introduction we survey only some examples of the relatively systematic and specialized usage of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ in recent world literature and comparative literature debates that draw on world systems theory from political and economic sociology. Developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, the theory envisages the whole world, since at least the sixteenth century, as one capitalist economy ‘built on a worldwidedivisionoflabor,inwhichvariouszonesofthiseconomy([...] termed the core, the semiperiphery, and the periphery) [...] profited unequally from the working of the system’. 2 Before sketching how the theory, and the terms, have been harnessed in literary discussions, we note that the semi-specialized sense in