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European peripheries in the postcolonial literary imagination

The idea of unbalanced power relations between (post)colonial centres and peripheries lies at the heart of postcolonial studies. In this pattern, Europe, through colonial discourses, has constructed itself as the centre, whereas former colonized spaces – or what is nowadays frequently referred to as the Global South – are conceived as geographical, economic, and cultural peripheries. The centre/periphery binary, as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (2007) put it in Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, “has been one of the most contentious ideas” in the field (2007, 32). Not only does it attempt to define the pattern, but those asserting the independence of the periphery run the risk of perpetuating the binary and continue to subscribe to the very idea of the centre instead of destabilizing it. The centre/ periphery model has mostly been associated with world-systems analysis as theorized by scholars such as Immanuel Wallerstein in the 1970s. This theory “locates the center of gravity of historical agency in north-western Europe” (Kaps and Komlosy 2013, 238), and, with its allusions to notions such as development and backwardness, the model echoes colonial discourses (240–241). Eurocentric and colonial understandings of what is central and peripheral have, obviously, been challenged by postcolonial intellectuals and writers. For instance, in Moving the Centre, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues for the need to disassociate the concept of the centre from the west and to adopt an understanding of the “plurality of centers all over the world” (1993, 11) – a pluralism in which the equality of languages plays a key role. Yet, at the same time, Ngũgĩ’s approach has been described as an Afrocentrist one, aiming at “achiev[ing] a shift in cultural centredness from the West to Africa” (McLaren 1998, 389). As such, the model can be seen to reverse the centre/periphery pattern by defining new centres instead of genuinely deconstructing the binary itself. Édouard Glissant (1997), however, in his Poetics of Relation, outlines a transformative poetics based on the idea of “equivalences of Relations” (29). He delineates this as having developed from primordial nomadism and its dualistic self-conception (citizen vs barbarian), in which centres and peripheries are equivalent, evolving into the settled way of life of western nations, in which movement becomes fixed, and identity is no longer developed in relation with the other but founded on the idea of rootedness and monolingualism. According to Glissant’s poetics of relation, writers can position themselves against the latter in harking back to the former in a form of “circular nomadism”, in which “the poet’s words lead from periphery to periphery” and, by making every periphery into a centre, “abolishes the very notion of the centre” (1997, 29). Such circular