Introduction: Engaging with the Poetics of Peripheralization

When Hosam Aboul-Ela published Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition in 2007, it was not unusual to place the works of William Faulkner in conversation with Latin American literature, an analytic move supported by factors such as shared experiences of defeat, the inequity of plantation cultures, and the presence of the past. Scholars have drawn connections between Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez since the 1980s, as seen in Harley D. Oberhelman's The Presence of Faulkner in the Writings of García Márquez (1980), and interest in these associations grew in the 1990s, as evidenced by a special issue of The Faulkner Journal, "A Latin American Faulkner" (Fall 1995/Spring 1996). Published in 1999, Deborah Cohn's History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction offered astute comparative textual analyses of the works of Faulkner and Spanish American authors in relation to "the consciousness of regional history and the approaches taken to narrate it" (3). Yet while scholarship on formal, thematic, and historiographic similarities between these oeuvres had achieved some traction, what made Aboul-Ela's book unique was his turn towards a Latin American theorist: Peruvian socialist and literary thinker, José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930). Aboul-Ela's title centers two writers from distinct but related spaces—Faulkner and Mariátegui—whose work at first glance may seem unrelated but, with an eye to local contexts and material conditions, can be seen to intersect in meaningful ways. The volume thus provides a model of how, through foregrounding the local and the material and staying open to unexpected connections, scholars of both American Southern and World Literatures can develop a deeper understanding of Global South aesthetics.¹

The intention for this special issue, "Engaging with the Poetics of Peripheralization," is to extend the implications of Aboul-Ela's groundbreaking Other South a full ten years after its initial publication, emphasizing a scholarly focus on aesthetics as well as an increased attention to the material and the specificity of the local. My own trajectory as a Faulkner enthusiast turned assistant professor of Global Anglophone Literatures reveals an investment in the relationship between the fields of New Southern Studies and World Literatures that led me to Aboul-Ela's book. Other South, which became the text I would over-cite in graduate school, clearly and productively positions Faulkner in relation to other Global South writers, such as Carlos Fuentes, Ghassan Kanafani, and Arundhati Roy, in a way that does not privilege a Euro-American modernist lens. Rather, Aboul-Ela outlines the Latin American-rooted system of thought grounded in the work of Mariátegui, which emphasizes political economy in the place of the concerns with language, representation, and subjectivity that are typically privileged by traditional Euro-American postcolonial theory. Other South draws attention to the need for non-western theoretical traditions to aid in "an unapologetic move towards a critical discourse of globalization that draws on global voices and eschews Eurocentrism," combating the partiality towards European thinkers and concepts in the United States' critical theory canon (Aboul-Ela 15, 16).²

In Other South, Aboul-Ela evaluates the types of questions asked by Postcolonial Studies in the late 1990s and early 2000s, suggesting that the emphasis placed on issues of representation, subjectivity, and psychology—as opposed to differences in economies, local histories, and social structures—tends to depoliticize scholarly inquiry (11–12). Scholars have long acknowledged the complications that arise when analyzing diverse literatures of the Global South and the concern that their work may be used to further the neoliberal project of economic globalization. In their introduction to a special issue of American Literature, "Global Contexts, Local Literatures: The New Southern Studies" (2006), Kathryn McKee and Annette Trefzer write that scholars expanding the border of American or Southern Studies in a global direction need to recognize our own situatedness when "writing from the privileged site of imperial North America and Europe … so that we do not recolonize the literatures and cultures we encounter" (689). In a similar sentiment from a different field, the Warwick...