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Literature and the peripheral city

ARTICLE in SOCIAL & CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY · OCTOBER 2015

Impact Factor: 1.28 · DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2015.1093341

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Juha Ridanpää
University of Oulu
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 Social & Cultural Geography

ISSN: 1464-9365 (Print) 1470-1197 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rscg20

Literature and the peripheral city

Juha Ridanpää

To cite this article: Juha Ridanpää (2015): Literature and the peripheral city, Social & Cultural
Geography, DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2015.1093341

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2015.1093341

Published online: 05 Oct 2015.

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Download by: [Oulu University Library] Date: 12 October 2015, At: 05:35
 Social & Cultural Geography, 2015

BOOK REVIEW

Literature and the peripheral city, edited by Lieven Ameel, Jason Finch and Markku
Salmela, Basingstoke, UK, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, v + 244 pp., £55.00 (hbk),
ISBN 978-1-137-49287-6

After the so-called ‘cultural turn’ the number of geographical studies has steadily risen
and recently literary critics have started to pay more and more attention to the various
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forms of spatiality that occur in literature. As a result, urbanity and urban literature have
become some of the most interesting research topics for both geographers and literary
critics. Urban landscapes, ways of life and all the socioeconomic discourses within
which urbanity attains its shapes and senses have in fact inspired artists around the
world for centuries. The main argument in Literature and the Peripheral City, edited by
Lieven Ameel, Jason Finch and Markku Salmela, is clear and simple: although cities
are generally defined by their centrality and high status as creatures of global capital,
the peripheries within urban areas and peripherality itself represent factors that define
urbanity as well. This point is exemplified and further discussed by 12 authors, mainly
literary critics, who through analysis of urban fiction bring up a variety of viewpoints
concerning how the identities of cities are defined by their peripherality.
The book consists of 12 chapters, which have been evenly set under two titles: ‘City
Peripheries’ and ‘Peripheral Cities, Genres and Writers’. The list of studied authors is
diverse, ranging from less familiar names such as Alexander Baron, Ivan Vladislavić,
Zakes Mda, Henrika Ringbom, Alejandro Zambra and Ricardo Piglia to more globally
acknowledged writers such as Thomas Pynchon, Knut Hamsun and August Strindberg.
Although peripherality as an aspect of urbanity is dissected from various perspectives,
the key task of addressing the nature, logics and dilemmas of urban centrality is never-
theless solidly presented throughout all the articles and thus helps keep the package
coherent.
To be fair, however, it did not come as a big surprise that in many articles the spa-
tiality of social and economic inequality functioned as the starting point for the analysis.
As Tambling in his theoretically oriented chapter proposes, the basic issue of the con-
cept of ‘central’ and its relation to the concept of ‘marginal’ is ultimately a matter of
social politics. While Finch, for example, approaches the literary construction of London
slums, or ‘semi-slums’, as examples of city peripheries through the works of George
Gissing and Alexander Baron, Salmela reads the postmodern writings of Pynchon as
descriptions of the dumping ground of subaltern realities. That said, when dissecting the
(literary) socio-economic forms of urban peripheriality in Santiago de Chile (Willem) or
the urban structure of Johannesburg (Wenzel), taking a critical eye is practically
unavoidable. Another ‘socially charged’ viewpoint is introduced by Talivee and Finch,
who illustrate ‘the power’ of literature itself by discussing how the literary work of one
particular author, the Estonian Eduard Vilde, has changed the literary/imaginary image
of a city (Tallinn) completely. The alternate viewpoints on urban peripherality, in which
social criticism was not overly emphasized, concerned topics such as the mental
 2 Book review

mappings of urban environments in Scandinavian literature (Selboe), spatial orientation

in Swedish young adult literature (Wistisen) and the role of Finnish forests not as an
exterior demarcation of urbanity but rather as a constituent of the urban environment
(Lappalainen).
Probably a tiny, but still distracting detail concerns the book’s structure: the editors’
decision to divide the book into two separate sections, of which the first covers periph-
eral aspects of ‘big cities’ and the second focuses on cities which, as spatial units, are
peripheral in the global context as such. This division feels partly artificial and unneces-
sary. The idea of defining the capitals of South Africa (Johannesburg), Argentina
(Santiago), Sweden (Stockholm) and Finland (Helsinki) as peripheral is somewhat
debatable. A step away from the ‘canonized literary cities’ of London, New York and
Paris should not automatically denote a step towards urban peripherality.
The starting point of the book offers an interesting possibility for contesting conven-
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tional manners of conceiving and comprehending space through the categorical distinc-
tion of centres and margins. Unfortunately, at some points this argument is simply
disavowed and the discussion about urban peripheries relies on Lefebvre’s time-worn
argument – also stated on the back cover – about how ‘without peripheries there would
be no centres’. The book ends with a distillation by Yoeli-Rimmer, relating how ‘the
overturning of the centre/periphery dichotomy can prove to be very liberating indeed’
(p. 230), an argument on which the other authors could have leaned more.
Although the book maintains thematic consistency from start to finish, Literature
and the Peripheral City in places suffers from lack of dialogue between the various arti-
cles, the usual problem of edited collections. Fortunately, there were a few exceptions.
In the key argument of her case study about the literature of Santiago de Chile, Willem
briefly but interestingly reflects on how a shift in perspective inverts the dichotomy of
centre and periphery, resuscitating the discussion from the book’s introduction. In a
similar fashion, reflecting on his manner of approaching the concept of ‘centrality’,
Nettah Yoeli-Rimmer also refers back to the introduction. These rare, though somewhat
pro forma, dialogues between different chapters were very welcome and should have
been utilized more throughout the book in order to underscore the strong thematic
consistency that the book certainly contains.
Literature and the Peripheral City has its shortcomings, but overall the unpacking
and deep pondering of the nature and logics of urban centrality is carried out in a highly
interesting manner throughout the book. Its diversity of theoretical, geographical and
literary perspectives is wide and the book is surely of interest to many scholars across
disciplinary boundaries. Reading through the urban peripheries was a mind-provoking
experience all the way from the first page to the last.

Juha Ridanpää
Department of Geography, University of Oulu
juha.ridanpaa@oulu.fi
© 2015, Juha Ridanpää
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2015.1093341