Podcast: Periphery and banishment

Ivana Perica and Aurore Peyroles discuss their books Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur: Socialist Central Europe 1928–1938 (London: Bloomsbury, 2025) and Voyages au bout de la banlieue: Représentations romanesques de la banlieue parisienne (1820–1950) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025). Both authors share a curiosity about the periphery and the phenomena of banishment and exclusion. Despite their different settings, times and subjects, the books enter into a dialogue with one another as complementary endeavors.

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Aurore Peyroles embarks on a journey into the Parisian banlieue and the world of ideas associated with it – from Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo to Louis-Ferdinand Céline. The banlieue, into which historically both cemeteries and factories, and thus death and labor, were relegated, can be read as a counterpoint to Paris, the "capital of modernity" (Benjamin). From the periphery, the center is thus called into question. In French literature, this simultaneously exposes republican promises by portraying the periphery as a space of transit and anonymity, where democratic participation in an imagined national community is impossible.

The historical Banlieue Rouge of the 1930s, a scene of political upheaval and revolutionary energy, remains surprisingly marginal in literature. The fact that the Banlieue finds any representation in literature at all can, however, be understood as political in Rancière's sense, since it often stems from the intention to reveal these otherwise invisible people and realities. Writing about the Banlieue thus makes visible what lies hidden and simultaneously exposes the invisible aspects of the norm.

For Ivana Perica, too, the focus is on the transformation of the sites of literary events and political debates. She examines how the relationship between literature and politics was negotiated at the historical turning points of 1928 and 1968 in Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Zagreb and Belgrade. They are particularly interested in the discussions surrounding a "tertium datur" (Lukács), a socialist third way, in the 1920s and its aftermath after 1945. The recurring question is: what should come first – revolutionary art or revolution?

The debates of 1928 reveal a political literature that differs from the one fixated on the autonomy of art, which became established primarily in the West after 1968. Many of the often party-affiliated left-wing authors of the interwar period saw themselves and their writing as part of a collective movement. However, they did not act as dogmatic mouthpieces for political slogans, but rather understood their texts as insightful contributions to a vibrant controversy. This controversy was conducted in international intellectual networks in a more nuanced way than a narrow focus on Moscow as the center of the political and social conflicts of the time would suggest.

The question of what political literature is, what it can and should achieve, and what understanding of politics underlies it, remains relevant today. It arises, for example, in the work of Joseph Ponthus, who discusses whether the dropout or the avowed activist is the 'true' political figure, as well as in the autosociobiography, in which the banlieue is reclaimed as a cultural marker of identity and as a place from which – and not only about which – writing takes place.