ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book distinguishes the post-revolutionary Mexican avant-garde Estridentismo movement from its European counterparts by drawing on Timothy Brennan's anticolonial categories such as montage, unevenness, sacrifice, and polemic. The idea that world literature is constituted by a struggle between nations is often forgotten in those theories of postcolonial and world literature that arrive at an unfettered cosmopolitanism. The chapter suggests that the avant-garde group's irrelevant deployment of irony allows us to expand Brennan’s conception of peripheral aesthetics. It draws on attention to Jose Arguedas' novel, Deep Rivers which considers a temporally regressive regional novel by those who recuperated it during the Latin American "boom" era. The chapter considers how the major communist author, Andrei Platonov, was refashioned into a social realist and modernist.
