ABSTRACT
Benita Parry is the postcolonial critic who has done most to promote the notion of "peripheral modernism" and to redefine the term to incorporate practices critical of literary modernism as it is normally understood in our graduate programs. The ambitious reformist energies of world literature, at least among its leading literary sociologists, desacralize the canon of modernism only to reassert modernity as a discourse of the material sciences divorced from the vagaries of taste, ideology, or invention. A reservation has to do with the lack of attention given in postcolonial studies, world literature, or distant reading to the persistent attack on the modernist aesthetic in peripheral literatures themselves. Bashir Abu-Manneh, in his excellent study of Palestinian literature, observes that in Third World contexts, when modernism arrives on the scene, it is usually to express a movement's defeat and dissolution.
