Second Worldism

Abstract

How might renewed attention to the legacy of cultural production under state socialism help us move past one of the defining impasses of literary studies after globalization—namely, the antinomy between an overarching, “one and unequal” world system and the radical particularity associated with “multiple” or “alternative” modernities? To answer this question, the six articles collected in this special issue explore various manifestations of the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD). Returning to the part of the world in which UCD was first articulated—East Europe and Eurasia, the most geographically immediate peripheries of Europe’s capitalist core—each author considers how UCD shapes the region’s cultural forms and, conversely, how artistic production gives shape to the phenomenon of UCD.