Realism at the Peripheries

Speaker: Ulka Anjaria

Realism tends to have a bad reputation in contemporary times. Generally thought to be an outdated mode which had its heyday in Victorian fiction, the French bourgeois novel, and pre-revolutionary Russian literature, literary histories tend to locate realism’s timely end in the ferment of inter-war modernism and the rise of the avant-garde. Outside of the west, realism might be said to have met even a worse fate, as it was a mode explicitly presented to colonized societies as a vehicle of modernity, in opposition to what were deemed the poetic excesses, irrational temporalities and/or oral storytelling influences of indigenous literature. Yet despite this sense of realism’s outdatedness and political conservativsm, the first decade and a half of the 21st century has witnessed, across a wide range of literature and cultural production, what might be seen as a return to realism, not simply as a resistance to today’s new culture of heterogeneity and digitization but as a new way of imagining literary and political futures in a world increasingly lacking the clear-cut lines along which politics, history and capitalism can be imagined. This article traces the arc of 21st century realism through contemporary debates around the term, suggesting that considering 21st-century realism not as a residual mode or grouping of texts but as a particular perspective on literary futures – as the coming together, for instance, of unresolved and newer conflicts over relations of power and the politics of knowledge – offers a different story of global form-making.