Rethinking the Center-Periphery Relationship in the Post-Cold War Era
Rethinking the Center-Periphery Relationship in the Post-Cold War Era

Summary/Abstract: This paper rethinks the center-periphery relationship in post-Cold War literature and culture. The author argues that the last two decades have freed our topographic imagination of traditional ideological polarizations, but have often replaced these polarized mappings with cartographies of a nationalistic or ethnocentric kind that promote resentful cultural divisions; or with “globalizing” ideologies which reinforce the “international division of labor and appropriation . . . benefiting First World countries at the expense of the Third World” (Teresa Ebert). The literary and artistic examples this paper considers, taken from both the US and East-Central Europe, transcend both leveling globalism and ethnocentric separatism, celebrating crossroads, bridges, cultural “hybridity” and “potentially limitless mappings”. The fiction of Thomas Pynchon, for example, from Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland to the more recent Mason & Dixon, has been concerned with the search for an alternative cartographic vision that scrambles the “borderline[s . . .] between worlds,” interplaying centers and peripheries. Likewise, the literature written more recently in East-Central Europe reflects the conflicting pulls towards world integration and selfdifferentiation "on the margins". The city characteristically plays a "marginocentric role" in many of these writings, emphasizing its own eccentric position in relationship to the dominant paradigm, while at the same time restructuring that paradigm from the margin. Much recent urban literature and art behaves like a hypertext (in some cases it is a hypertext) that emphasize geocultural interfaces (crossroads, borderlands, multicultural cities and regions) and dialogic interactions among various cultural entities. As such, it demands a hypertextual reading attentive to its intercrossed discursive modes.

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