The question of peripheral modernism is a question riddled with anxieties. Anxieties about competence, originality, and elitism, determinedly mediated by the seductions of institutional recognition. Against this background, disillusionment rules, dark feelings abound, and theory equivocates. The category itself appears to defy stability: it is as stringent as it is elastic, as promising as it is fateful. As a modifier, peripheral obscures what has from its inception been considered a mysterious concept, from Perry Anderson’s declaration that “[m]odernism as a notion is the emptiest of all cultural categories,” to Carlos Blanco Aguinaga’s undeniable perception that “confusion reigns among hegemonic theoreticians as to what modernism is or is not,” to Sean Latham’s and Gayle Rogers’ more recent reminder that “the word [modernism] has often been flexible, capacious, inventive, and unstable.”

Modernism/modernity Print Plus, vol. 11, no. 2, August 31, 2026. https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0360