By Michèle Fornhoff-Levitt

Abstract: This article proposes a reframing of peripherality by foregrounding instability as a central analytic lens. While the periphery is often conceived as a static location defined by distance from a cultural or political centre, the article argues that such marginality is better grasped through the forms of instability it entails. Instability — produced by shifting borders, uneven linguistic hierarchies, and the precarities of migration — does not merely accompany peripheral positions but constitutes them, shaping how communities experience their place in the world and how they respond to the surrounding pressures. By treating instability as the key to understanding what peripherality does rather than where it is located, the article shifts attention from the periphery’s supposed deficits to the dynamic processes it sets in motion. This reframing enables a more nuanced account of how peripheral communities navigate uncertainty, adapt creatively, and generate cultural forms that both reflect and transform their conditions of marginality. This approach is illustrated through the example of Yiddish theatre in interwar Paris. Originating in the semi-peripheral cultural and political settings of Eastern Europe and re-established within the hierarchically structured cultural space of the French capital, Yiddish theatre exemplifies how layered forms of peripherality — shaped both by Eastern Europe’s semi-peripheral position vis-à-vis the West and by the marginalization of Yiddish as a migrant culture within Western Europe — can generate new modes of artistic expression. Rather than offering a comprehensive historical account, the article considers this milieu as a vantage point for observing how instability is negotiated and transformed into creative practice. Theatre’s inherent ephemerality and adaptability made it an especially effective medium for representing and materializing such instability. The article does not aim to advance a new theory of peripherality; rather, it offers a different way of looking at how marginal positions function as creative and performative engines. By shifting emphasis from historical reconstruction to conceptual insight, it suggests that peripheries are not merely sites of vulnerability but also spaces in which cultural futures are imagined, rehearsed, and contested. This perspective underscores the wider significance of Eastern European cultural formations and their interactions with Western contexts, while contributing to debates about the dynamics emerging from Europe’s margins.

Keywords: Peripherality, Imperialism, Instability, Diaspora , Eastern Europe, Yiddish theatre.

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Introduction

The language of “periphery” has become ubiquitous in discussions of Europe and Eurasia, appearing in world-systems theory, debates on the “Global East,” post-imperial and post-socialist studies, migration and diaspora research, and the study of minoritized languages and cultures. Yet it is often used as if its meaning were self-evident: the periphery is simply whatever lies at the margins of a centre, belated, dependent, or derivative. This article starts from a different question: not where the periphery is, but how peripherality is lived — and what happens if we treat instability as its defining condition.

A wide body of scholarship reveals a shared, if often implicit, intuition that unstable situations can be culturally productive. Core-periphery and semi-periphery models^[1] point to the dynamism of regions located at points of tension or transition within larger political and cultural systems; work on the “Global East”^[2] underlines Eastern Europe’s shifting, ambiguous position vis-à-vis a self-defined “West”; diaspora studies^[3] show how displaced communities devise hybrid, improvisational practices under circumstances of precarious belonging; and theories of liminality and performance^[4] emphasize the experimental potential of in-between situations. Taken together, these perspectives suggest that instability is not only destructive but can generate new forms of cultural life. What is rarely pursued is the consequence of taking this seriously for the concept of periphery itself. Theatre offers a particularly sharp vantage point, since as an ephemeral and adaptive art form it makes visible how instability can be turned into practice, form, and collective experience.

The article, therefore, proposes a shift of emphasis: peripheries are understood not as fixed margins but as configurations of instability — spatial-geopolitical, cultural-linguistic, and social-political — that can act as engines of cultural innovation. Peripheries matter not only because they mark the limits of dominant orders, but because they generate alternatives: new forms of expression, new public spheres,^[5] new narratives of belonging. To pursue this, I develop a conceptual framework that distinguishes three interlocking dimensions of peripherality and then examine how they combine in situations of “double peripherality,” where communities inhabit more than one peripheral position at once. Such layering, I suggest, amplifies instability and intensifies creative and performative agency.

The argument is grounded in the Yiddish theatre of interwar Paris. Between the end of the First World War and the eve of the Second, Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe made Paris one of the most active Yiddish theatrical centres of the period.^[6] Emerging from itinerant theatre traditions shaped by overlapping empires and antisemitic exclusion, and re-situated within Western Europe’s cultural hierarchies, this milieu exemplifies double peripherality in practice. Performers and audiences moved from a first periphery — the semi-peripheral zones of Eastern Europe — to a second periphery as migrants and Yiddish speakers in the French capital, creating a highly adaptive theatrical ecosystem that reworked repertoires, experimented with performance codes, and articulated alternative visions of Jewish modernity.

Parisian Yiddish theatre thus functions less as an object of exhaustive reconstruction than as a conceptual lens. It makes visible how different dimensions of peripherality intersect; how instability is negotiated institutionally and aesthetically; and how marginal publics can operate as laboratories of cultural and political imagination. At the same time, it points to broader East-West trajectories, showing how eastern peripheries do not simply “feed” a stable Western core but reshape cultural landscapes through their very instability. Theatre is well suited to this analysis because its structures — improvisation, adaptation, ensemble practice — are themselves forms of organized instability.

Methodologically, the article positions itself as a conceptual intervention informed by historical, cultural, and performance-oriented research. It does not seek to provide a comprehensive synthesis of the literature it engages, but to bring existing insights about instability and creativity into a more explicit relationship, using a focused case study to illustrate their analytical potential. The aim is to show how treating instability as constitutive of peripherality can sharpen our understanding of how peripheries operate — and why they matter.

The article unfolds in four steps. The next section outlines a tripartite framework of spatial-geopolitical, cultural-linguistic, and social-political peripherality. The following section introduces “double peripherality” to describe situations in which these dimensions are layered and compounded. The third section develops the claim that peripherality can function as a creative and performative engine, with a particular attention to theatre. A fourth section considers how peripheral cultural formations serve as laboratories of alternative futures. A brief conclusion reflects on the implications of this reframing for the study of Eastern European cultural formations and their entanglements with the West, and for current debates about the cultural and political futures emerging from Europe’s margins.

Rethinking Peripherality: Three Interlocking Dimensions

The term “periphery” is often used as conceptually self-explanatory: a position outside a dominant centre, defined primarily by distance, lack, or belatedness. Yet scholarship across several fields suggests a more complex picture. Peripherality is not a single, unified state but a multidimensional configuration, produced through spatial-geopolitical arrangements, symbolic and linguistic hierarchies, and the social-political dynamics of migration and minority life. This section proposes a tripartite framework that distinguishes these dimensions in order to clarify how they operate, overlap, and generate forms of instability through which peripheral life is structured. While conceptually distinct, these dimensions frequently reinforce one another; their intersection is what gives peripherality its potency as both a lived situation and an analytical category.

Spatial-Geopolitical Peripherality: East of the West

In European intellectual and political history, the most persistent axis of peripherality has been the East-West divide. Since the Enlightenment, Eastern Europe has been constructed as the “other” of a self-defined Western modernity, as historians such as Larry Wolff and Maria Todorova have shown.^[7] More recently, theorists of the “Global East”^[8] have argued that Eastern Europe occupies a semi-peripheral position: neither fully aligned with the Global North nor adequately captured by North-South binaries. This perspective has been extended further by highlighting the region’s structurally unstable and symbolically ambiguous relation to Western European cultural and political norms.^[9]

Spatial-geopolitical peripherality is not only a matter of geography but of symbolic positioning. Concepts such as Milica Bakić-Hayden’s “nesting Orientalisms” show how Eastern Europe has long been structured through internal hierarchies, each region projecting “backwardness” onto its own east,^[10] while Laura Doyle’s work on inter-imperiality highlights the multiple, overlapping empires — Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman — that shaped the region, producing chronic instability and uneven modernization rather than a unified cultural sphere.^[11] Additional analyses on “internal colonization”further underscore how imperial formations created uneven, unstable regimes across Eastern Europe.^[12]

For Yiddish-speaking Jews, the East constituted their first periphery: they lived within imperial regimes marked by political volatility, shifting borders, linguistic stratification, and exclusionary citizenship policies. Spatial-geopolitical instability — frequent regime changes, contested territories, and ethnicized state policies — formed the backdrop against which Eastern European Jewish cultural life developed. This background shaped the theatrical repertoires that later arrived in Paris. Companies such as the Vilner Trupe^[13] had developed their aesthetic in the politically turbulent environments of Vilna, Kaunas, and Warsaw, where censorship, language politics, and unstable patronage networks forced them toward experimentation with mise-en-scène and ensemble methods. When the troupe toured Paris in 1922, their landmark production of Dibek revealed how geopolitical instability could translate into a distinct expressionist vocabulary: stylized gestures, chanting sequences, and scenography built around stark contrasts of light and shadow. Likewise, the GOSET^[14] (State Jewish Theatre, Moscow), trained under Aleksei Granovsky and molded by Soviet nationality policy, carried to Paris an elaborate dramaturgical style that fused modernist choreography with Jewish ritual and folklore. Their set and costume designs — inspired by the visual idioms of Marc Chagall, Natan Altman, or Isaac Rabinovich — introduced French audiences to an aesthetic shaped by the cultural pressures of the Eastern European borderlands. Critics noted how these expressionist elements marked them as “Eastern,” even as they positioned Yiddish theatre within avant-garde currents circulating in the French capital.

Cultural-Linguistic Peripherality: Minor Languages, Symbolic Hierarchies

A second dimension of peripherality emerges from the hierarchies of language and cultural legitimacy. Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of linguistic markets shows how dominant languages accrue symbolic power, while minority languages remain structurally devalued.^[15] In Eastern Europe, Yiddish was precisely such a language: widely spoken yet marginalized, associated with poverty, inferiority, or parochialism, and often excluded from state institutions.^[16]

Pascale Casanova’s work on the “world literary space” extends these insights to a global scale.^[17] In The World Republic of Letters, she argues that literary cultures exist within a transnational hierarchy dominated by a small number of highly legitimized linguistic centres — above all Paris. “Small” literatures, in her terms, especially those written in “minor” languages, i.e. with low literary capital, are structurally positioned as outsiders within the world literary space.^[18] Their very marginality compels them toward inventive strategies and alternative modes of self-definition, differentiating them from dominant literary nations.

These dynamics find further explanatory power in Itamar Even-Zohar’s Polysystem Theory.^[19] Within any cultural system, peripheral literatures occupy unstable but strategically significant positions. They are sites of experimentation, borrowing, hybridization, and accelerated innovation. Because they lack institutional protection, they must remain flexible, adaptive, and responsive to external pressures. In this sense, instability is not merely a consequence of cultural-linguistic marginality but its generative dynamic. Besides, as Kenneth Moss^[20] has shown in his study of Jewish cultural modernism in revolutionary Russia, Yiddish writers and artists often operated within fluid and unstable institutional environments, where the absence of fixed cultural hierarchies opened space for rapid experimentation and the emergence of new aesthetic forms.

Yiddish cultural production — including theatre — operated in such a marginalized space, where norms were porous and genres mobile. When transplanted into Western Europe, this linguistic peripherality did not diminish; it intensified, placing Yiddish speakers in a doubly “subordinated” position within the cultural hierarchy of Paris. This was evident in the programming choices of Parisian Yiddish troupes. On the one hand, they drew on the classical canon — Goldfaden’s operettas, Sholem Aleichem’s domestic comedies, Peretz’s symbolist dramas — texts familiar to Yiddish-speaking audiences and anchored in a shared linguistic world. On the other hand, they adapted French works into Yiddish to negotiate their minority status: productions of Molière’s The Miser or Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in Yiddish translation, staged for mixed audiences, simultaneously claimed cultural legitimacy and exposed linguistic asymmetries. These adaptations required extensive linguistic and cultural mediation: jokes had to be recontextualized, class-based humor recalibrated for immigrant working-class audiences, and verse structures reshaped to fit Yiddish prosody. Such productions simultaneously claimed cultural legitimacy and exposed the linguistic asymmetries structuring theatrical life in Paris.

Social-Political Peripherality: Migration, Precarity, and Marginal Publics

The third dimension of peripherality is social-political, arising from the dynamics of migration, minority status, and precarious belonging. Diaspora theorists such as Stuart Hall,^[21] James Clifford,^[22] and Avtar Brah^[23] have stressed that diasporic identities are formed through movement and discontinuity, producing identities that are hybrid, negotiated, and responsive to ongoing instability. Displacement generates new solidarities but also heightens vulnerability: economic insecurity, legal precarity, and the absence of institutional support. Yet marginal publics — as theorists of counterpublics^[24] such as Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner have shown — can become rich sites of cultural experimentation, precisely because they exist outside dominant norms and expectations. Social-political peripherality thus contributes a further layer of instability: one that shapes patterns of community life, institutional improvisation, and artistic production. In the theatrical sphere, this becomes visible in the formation of independent venues, the flexibility of ensembles, and the responsiveness of performance practices to the needs and pressures of migrant publics.

For Eastern European Jews arriving in Western Europe, social-political peripherality took a new form: no longer shaped by imperial marginality, but by the precarious position of migrants within nationalizing, assimilationist Western states. In Paris, Yiddish-speaking Jews found themselves excluded from mainstream cultural institutions, marked as foreigners, and often constrained by economic survival. A concrete example is provided by the working conditions of Paris-based Yiddish troupes in Belleville and Montmartre, where actors often performed in improvised spaces such as rented cinemas, cooperative halls, or back rooms of cafés. Many performers combined daytime employment in the garment trades or peddling with evening rehearsals, resulting in highly irregular schedules and constant cast reshuffling. These practical constraints shaped the very form of the performances: sets were minimal or portable, costumes were borrowed or self-made, and scenes were reblocked on the spot when actors were absent. Yet such precarious circumstances also fostered dense networks of solidarity and created a theatrical culture in which improvisation was not merely a technique but a survival strategy. Accordingly, social-political marginality deeply inscribed itself into the theatrical life of interwar Paris, generating forms of creativity that emerged directly from the lived realities of migrant publics.

These three dimensions — spatial-geopolitical, cultural-linguistic, and social-political — rarely operate in isolation. In contexts such as Eastern European Jewish migration, they intersect to produce layered forms of instability: geopolitical insecurity, linguistic marginality, and socio-economic precarity reinforce one another. It is this intersection that makes peripherality such a powerful analytical lens. Peripherality is not simply “being outside the centre”; it is the interaction of multiple pressures that destabilize identity, institutions, and cultural practices — conditions that, as this article argues, can also stimulate creative agency. When these dimensions accumulate in the experience of a single community, their effects become compounded, giving rise to what may be described as a form of double peripherality. The next section turns to this notion in order to clarify how such layered instabilities shape cultural life and open the space for creative response.

Double Peripherality: Layered Forms of Marginality

Peripherality rarely manifests as a single, isolated structure. For many communities, marginality, as I have argued, is produced at the intersection of several structural forces —geopolitical, linguistic, cultural, and socio-political — that accumulate and reinforce one another. To describe this phenomenon, I use the term “double peripherality”. The phrase does not designate a rigid theoretical category, but offers a concise way of capturing how certain groups experience more than one form of peripherality simultaneously, and how this layering intensifies the instabilities that shape their cultural and social practices. The idea resonates with existing discussions of “nested marginalities” (Bakić-Hayden), semi-peripherality in world-systems analysis (Wallerstein), and the layered positionalities described in diaspora studies (Hall; Clifford; Brah) mentioned earlier. Double peripherality, therefore, synthesizes insights from these fields to designate the compounded marginality experienced by diasporic Eastern European Jews in the early twentieth century.

As outlined above, these communities already inhabited a first periphery within Eastern Europe. Their position was structured by the region’s semi-peripheral relation to the West (as theorized by Müller, Buchowski, Zarycki, and others), by the symbolic hierarchies of East and West (documented in works from Wolff to Todorova), and by the inter-imperial formations that defined political life in the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman borderlands (Doyle). This geopolitical marginality was compounded by the cultural-linguistic peripherality of Yiddish, a minoritized language situated at the edges of several overlapping literary and linguistic fields (Bourdieu, Even-Zohar, and Casanova). Within these systems, Yiddish cultural producers operated in a space defined more by flexibility, borrowing, and improvisation than by institutional stability or recognition.

Migration to Western Europe — whether for economic opportunity, cultural aspiration, or in response to violence — did not resolve this peripherality. Rather, it constituted entry into a second periphery, shaped by the dynamics of diaspora, minority status, and political vulnerability. As quoted scholars of diaspora have emphasized, movement introduces new forms of instability: precarious livelihoods, shifting legal statuses, and the need to negotiate belonging within national frameworks that often exclude or assimilate incompletely.^[25]

This dual positioning became immediately visible in the theatrical landscape of interwar Paris. Yiddish companies arriving from Eastern Europe were celebrated in immigrant circles yet received with exoticizing curiosity by French critics, who often described their work as “artful but foreign,” underlining their structural outsiderness. Parisian audiences — Jewish or non-Jewish — who did not understand Yiddish relied on plot summaries printed in bilingual programs, while immigrant spectators from Eastern Europe attended performances in the Jewish neighborhood venues of the Pletzl,^[26] Belleville or Montmartre, where the idiom was readily intelligible to them, but the theatres themselves remained socially peripheral within the broader Parisian stage world. The result was a divided reception space: French audiences tended to evaluate the troupe through an ethnographic or exoticizing lens, whereas Yiddish-speaking immigrants approached the same productions as expressions of cultural continuity, national aspiration, or communal pride.^[27]

Paris-based Yiddish troupes also navigated this dual marginality by attempting to professionalize Yiddish theatre by adopting Western rehearsal methods and promoting “serious” drama.^[28] A particularly clear expression of double peripherality can be seen in the work of the Parizer Yidisher Arbeter Teater (PYAT), one of the few stable Yiddish theatre groups active in interwar Paris. Composed of immigrant workers, PYAT sought to stage the artistically ambitious Yiddish repertoire — works by Sholem Aleichem, Y.L. Peretz, and Yiddishist^[29] writers — within circumstances marked by chronic instability. Rehearsals often took place late at night after long workdays; venues were rented by the evening; scenery and costumes were improvised from inexpensive materials. Despite these constraints, PYAT’s productions frequently drew large immigrant audiences who regarded these plays as vital expressions of cultural continuity and collective dignity. At the same time, PYAT remained entirely peripheral to the French theatrical system. Its performances were rarely noted outside the Yiddish press, and French cultural institutions showed low or no interest in hosting or recognizing the troupe’s work, even when staging ambitious repertoire. PYAT thus operated in two overlapping forms of marginality at once: one inherited from Eastern Europe, where Yiddish occupied a minoritized cultural and linguistic position, and another produced in Paris, where Yiddish theatre existed outside the symbolic hierarchy of the French stage.

It is here that double peripherality becomes analytically meaningful. The term highlights not simply the coexistence of two peripheries, but the interaction they produce: the way geopolitical and cultural marginality interacts with the precarities of migration to generate intensified forms of instability. These instabilities structure the conditions under which cultural and communal life must be organized, shaping patterns of mobility, institutional improvisation, and collective self-positioning. What matters here is the compounded nature of the condition itself; the creative responses it later enables are the focus of the next section.

Peripherality as a Creative and Performative Engine

If peripherality is often associated with deprivation, belatedness, or exclusion, the preceding sections suggest a different interpretation: that peripheries may constitute privileged sites of cultural invention. This section examines how instability — whether geopolitical, cultural-linguistic, or social-political — generates creative responses in the present, transforming marginal settings into engines of aesthetic and institutional innovation, especially in theatrical practice.

While the idea that instability can stimulate creativity is well established in scholarship on liminality,^[30] hybridity,^[31] and diaspora, this section focuses on how such dynamics operate when instability is not episodic but structural, as in peripheral cultural contexts.

Instability stimulates invention in several ways. First, it weakens existing norms. Communities operating at the periphery of cultural or political systems are less constrained by institutional expectations and often possess fewer resources with which to sustain rigid traditions. This lack of stability enables a degree of formal and aesthetic flexibility unavailable in more codified cultural environments. Second, instability produces hybrid forms: actors draw on multiple repertoires, languages, and styles to navigate their circumstances. Third, instability fosters institutional improvisation: peripheral cultural producers build alternative infrastructures — new venues, informal networks, translocal collaborations — when existing ones exclude them. In these ways, instability becomes a productive cultural condition rather than a mere deficiency.

In peripheral settings, theatrical practice is shaped less by stable institutions than by the constant need to adapt to fluctuating material, social, and human conditions. As performance theorist Erika Fischer-Lichte has shown, the dynamics of ephemerality and emergence are central to theatrical meaning-making — features that resonate strongly with peripheral theatre spaces.^[32]

Here again, the Yiddish theatre of interwar Paris exemplifies these dynamics with particular clarity. Operating under configurations of double peripherality, companies operated outside dominant French cultural institutions while carrying within them the itinerant, adaptive traditions of Eastern European Jewish performance. This generated both constraints and freedoms. Companies staged productions in temporary venues — working-class cafés, community halls, rented cinemas — spaces that demanded ingenuity in scenography and performance. Repertoires combined translations of French, English, and German plays with Eastern European melodramas, shund,^[33] and new works that reflected the anxieties of exile. A typical evening program might pair a Goldfaden operetta scene with a comic sketch adapted from Sholem Aleichem, reflecting both audience expectations and the need to offer variety to heterogeneous publics. Casting was fluid, with actors arriving from Berlin, Warsaw, Łódź, or Moscow; creative teams improvised in response to changing personnel. In practice, this meant developing flexible performance formats capable of absorbing disruption, substitution, and improvisation without interrupting the continuity of theatrical life.

Because they operated outside mainstream French theatrical institutions, Yiddish theatre-makers addressed audiences excluded from dominant cultural frameworks and responded directly to their social and political concerns. Their performances generated new cultural forms that responded to the immediate social conditions of diaspora life, grounding innovation in the pressures and possibilities of the present.

Peripheries as Sites of Alternative Futures

Peripheral settings do not only generate creative responses in the present; they also open spaces for imagining what does not yet exist. Because they stand outside dominant institutional frameworks and cultural expectations, peripheries often develop a heightened capacity to formulate alternatives — visions that challenge the assumptions of the centre or diverge from its established trajectories. As such, theatre becomes a laboratory of futurity: a medium in which marginal communities rehearse, test, and project new social, ethical, or cultural possibilities.

The future-oriented dimension of peripheral cultural production has been theorized across several fields, albeit often without sustained attention to cultural practice. Nancy Fraser’s work on subaltern counterpublics shows how marginalized groups articulate needs and aspirations excluded from dominant discourse. Diaspora theorists such as Stuart Hall emphasize that displaced communities forge new modes of belonging that exceed national frameworks. Modernity theorists — from Eisenstadt’s^[34] “multiple modernities” to Árnason’s^[35] “plural modernities” and Bhabha’s analyses of hybrid temporalities — demonstrate that innovation and alternative futures frequently emerge not from the centre but from its edges. Peripheries, by virtue of their instability, are often the first to register the limits of existing structures and to envision possibilities beyond them.

In interwar Paris, Yiddish theatre was one such space. Repertoire choices were a central vehicle for projecting imagined futures. Local and touring troupes frequently programmed “problem plays” that addressed abortion, white slavery, crime, or generational rupture. These works dramatized the social and moral dilemmas of modern urban life and invited audiences to consider what Jewish existence in the metropolis might become. By exposing the pressures of assimilation, the erosion of traditional norms, and the anxieties of communal continuity, such plays implicitly mapped possible futures — desirable or feared — for a diasporic community negotiating modern Europe.

Canonical Yiddish works likewise acquired future-oriented inflections. Peretz’s Bay nakht afn altn mark (At Night on the Old Marketplace), with its allegorical meditation on ethical responsibility, was staged as a reflection on the forms of moral life that could survive displacement. Performances of Anski’s Dibek juxtaposed a mystical past with the question of spiritual or cultural endurance, exploring which elements of Jewish tradition might carry forward in new social environments. Political theatre, especially in PYAT’s socialist or worker-oriented productions, pushed these explorations further still: plays such as David Bergelson’s Der toyber (The Deaf Man) — a dramatization of social and moral deafness — envisioned collective futures shaped by solidarity, justice, or transnational commitments, projecting political horizons not yet realized.

Futurity was not only thematic; it was also institutional. Debates about shund and the desire to elevate artistic standards expressed a collective aspiration for a more ambitious theatre — one that could sustain the community culturally and symbolically. Efforts to curate more serious repertoire, professionalize performance practices, or cultivate more demanding audiences were attempts to shape the future of Yiddish cultural life in Paris. Even when resources were limited, the very impulse to “create a better theatre” reflected an investment in cultural continuity and the imagining of a durable communal identity.

In combination, these dynamics reveal that Yiddish theatre in interwar Paris functioned not merely as entertainment or a refuge from daily hardship but as a crucible of projected possibilities. Through problem plays confronting social futures, canonical works reframed to interrogate cultural survival, political dramas envisioning collective transformation, and institutional aspirations aimed at raising artistic standards, theatre became a medium through which alternative futures were imagined and rehearsed. Its stages allowed performers and audiences to explore identities not captured by nation-state narratives, to articulate forms of belonging not sanctioned by official institutions, and to project communal horizons beyond those permitted by dominant cultural frameworks.

Ultimately, these practices show how Yiddish theatre in interwar Paris functioned as a space for projecting futures otherwise unavailable to its audiences — social, ethical, political, and institutional. Through repertoire, performance, and cultural debate, theatre enabled performers and spectators alike to explore what Jewish life in Europe might become under conditions of displacement and uncertainty.

Conclusion: Reframing the Peripheral Condition

This article has used the case of Yiddish theatre in interwar Paris to argue that peripherality is best understood not as a fixed position at the margins of a centre, but as a configuration of instabilities. Spatial-geopolitical, cultural-linguistic, and social-political pressures do not simply surround peripheral communities; they structure the terrain on which those communities live, make decisions, and create. When these dimensions accumulate, as in situations of double peripherality, they do not merely deepen exclusion but reshape the conditions under which cultural life becomes possible.

Treating instability as constitutive of peripherality brings into focus dynamics that are otherwise easy to overlook. It clarifies why peripheral actors are often compelled to improvise institutions, to traverse multiple repertoires and languages, and to experiment with new forms of belonging. The case of Yiddish theatre in interwar Paris has served here not as an object of exhaustive reconstruction, but as a lens: it makes visible how layered marginalities can be converted into a dense theatrical space, and how performance can turn precarious circumstances into shared forms, narratives, and imagined futures. Seen from this angle, peripherality ceases to be defined primarily by lack. It appears instead as a site where instability condenses into creative and performative energy, and where alternative social and cultural possibilities are first articulated. For the study of Eastern European cultural formations and their entanglements with the West, this means taking seriously the analytical value of positions long treated as derivative or secondary. More broadly, it suggests that any account of Europe’s cultural futures that looks only to established centres will miss much of what is already being rehearsed at the edges. New cultural forms, social imaginaries, and possible futures hence first take shape at the margins: this, ultimately, is why peripherality matters.

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Endnotes

^[1] Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vols. 1–3 (New York: Academic Press, 1974–1989).

^[2] Martin Müller, “In Search of the ‘Global East’: Thinking Between North and South,” Geopolitics 23, no. 1 (2018): 1–23; Michał Buchowski, “The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic Other to Stigmatized Minority,” Anthropological Quarterly 79, no. 3 (2006): 463–482; Tomasz Zarycki, Ideologies of Eastness in Central and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 2014).

^[3] Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 222–237; James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

^[4] Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1969); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

^[5] The term “public sphere” derives from Jürgen Habermas’s account of the arenas in which citizens participate in shared debate and opinion formation. Later theorists have shown that participation in such spaces is unequal, leading marginalized groups to form alternative or “counterpublic” spheres. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

^[6] Michèle Fornhoff-Levitt, Le théâtre yiddish de l’entre-deux-guerres à Paris, PhD diss., Sorbonne Université / Université libre de Bruxelles, 2023.

^[7] Larry Wolff demonstrates how Enlightenment thinkers symbolically “invented” Eastern Europe as Europe’s backward counterpart, establishing a civilizational gradient that continues to shape East-West distinctions. Maria Todorova extends this argument to the Balkans, showing how Western discourse repeatedly constructed the region as Europe’s internal other, neither fully European nor entirely outside it. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

^[8] Recent scholarship on the “Global East” challenges conventional North–South frameworks by situating Eastern Europe as a semi-peripheral formation, marked by asymmetrical entanglements with Western Europe. Müller and Buchowski highlight how this region remains symbolically subordinated even after post-socialist transformation, while Zarycki shows how these hierarchies persist through cultural, political, and knowledge-production asymmetries. Martin Müller, “In Search of the ‘Global East’: Thinking Between North and South”, 1-23; Michał Buchowski, “The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic Other to Stigmatized Minority”, 463-482; Tomasz Zarycki, Ideologies of Eastness in Central and Eastern Europe.

^[9] Building on this, scholars such as Baker and Tlostanova emphasize Eastern Europe’s symbolic volatility, showing how the region oscillates between imagined geopolitical blocs and remains subject to shifting regimes of cultural classification. Their analyses stress the instability of the region’s identity within global hierarchies. Catherine Baker, “The ‘Global East’ as a Useful Category?” E-International Relations (2018); Madina Tlostanova, “Postsocialist ≠ Postcolonial? On Post-Soviet Imaginary and Global Coloniality”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48, no. 2 (2012): 130-142.

^[10] Milica Bakić-Hayden’s concept of “nesting Orientalisms” demonstrates how Eastern Europe reproduces its own internal civilizational hierarchies, with each region projecting “backwardness” onto those further east — a structure that mirrors Western Europe’s earlier Orientalizing discourses. Milica Bakić-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms”, Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 917-931.

^[11] Laura Doyle’s work on inter-imperiality reconceptualizes Eastern Europe as a contact zone of competing imperial powers, emphasizing that chronic border shifts and overlapping jurisdictions generated long-term patterns of instability rather than coherent national spaces. Laura Doyle, Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).

^[12] Alexander Etkind develops a parallel argument through the lens of “internal colonization,” showing how imperial Russia reproduced colonial dynamics within its own borders, producing uneven development and stratified cultural fields across its territories. Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).

^[13] The Vilna Troupe (Vilner Trupe), founded in Vilna during the First World War, was one of the most influential modernist Yiddish theatre collectives of the early twentieth century. Known for its experimental aesthetics, ensemble-based working methods, and itinerant mode of production, the troupe played a decisive role in redefining Yiddish theatre as a serious artistic form. Through its international circulation — across Eastern and Western Europe and beyond — it became emblematic of a modern, transnational Yiddish theatrical culture shaped by displacement, instability, and artistic innovation. On the Vilna Troupe, see Debra Caplan, Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018).

^[14] GOSET (Gosudarstvennyi Evreiskii Teatr, State Jewish Theatre), founded in Moscow in 1919 under the artistic direction of Alexander Granovsky and later associated with Solomon Mikhoels, was the most prominent institutional experiment in modernist Yiddish theatre in the Soviet Union. Combining avant-garde staging, constructivist scenography, and a politicized engagement with Yiddish culture, GOSET sought to redefine Jewish theatre within a socialist framework. Its productions exerted wide influence on Yiddish theatre aesthetics across Europe, serving as a reference point — both positive and contested — for Jewish theatre-makers operating in non-Soviet contexts, including Paris.

^[15] Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

^[16] David Fishman, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005).

^[17] Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

^[18] Pierre Bourdieu uses the term “symbolic capital” to describe non-material forms of value — such as prestige, cultural legitimacy, or recognition — that function like economic capital within social fields. In linguistic contexts, symbolic capital refers to the authority or prestige attached to certain languages or varieties, which grants their speakers differential power and converts linguistic practices into social advantage. See Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

^[19] Itamar Even-Zohar, “Polysystem Studies”, special issue of Poetics Today 11, no. 1 (1990).

^[20] Kenneth B. Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

^[21] Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, 222-237.

^[22] James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century.

^[23] Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996).

^[24] Counterpublics are spaces created by marginalized groups to express themselves when they are excluded from mainstream public life. See Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere”, Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56-80; and Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002). Fraser argues that marginalized groups create “subaltern counterpublics” to articulate perspectives excluded from dominant publics, while Warner highlights the performative practices that sustain such alternative arenas. This concept helps understand how venues like the Parisian Yiddish theatre functioned as spaces for diasporic visibility and cultural self-definition.

^[25] Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”; James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century; Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996).

^[26] “The Pletzl” refers to the historic Jewish quarter of Paris centred on the rue des Rosiers in the Marais (4^th arrondissement). From the late nineteenth century through the interwar period, it functioned as a dense hub of Eastern European Jewish immigrant life, housing synagogues, cafés, bookstores, political organizations, and cultural venues, including spaces used for Yiddish theatre and performance. The term, derived from Yiddish pletzl (“small square”), was commonly used by Jewish residents to designate this neighborhood.

^[27] Michèle Fornhoff-Levitt, Le théâtre yiddish de l’entre-deux-guerres à Paris.

^[28] Ibid.

^[29] Yiddishism refers to a cultural and political movement that emerged in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, advocating Yiddish as a modern national language and the foundation of a secular Jewish culture. Opposing both assimilationist tendencies and the exclusive privileging of Hebrew, Yiddishists promoted literature, theatre, education, and scholarship in Yiddish as vehicles for collective identity and cultural autonomy in the diaspora. On Yiddishism, see David Fishman, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005); Cecile Esther Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

^[30] Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure.

^[31] Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture.

^[32] Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2008).

^[33] Shund (Yid. “trash” or “pulp”) was the term used to describe popular Yiddish melodramas, comedies, and sensational plays that were commercially successful but often dismissed by critics and cultural elites as formulaic or lowbrow. Despite this reputation, shund genres played a central role in sustaining Yiddish theatre, attracting broad audiences and providing an important space for experimentation, community building, and the negotiation of modern Jewish identities.

^[34] Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities”, Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000): 1-29.

^[35] Jóhann P. Árnason, Social Theory and Japanese Experience: The Duality of Modernity (London: Kegan Paul, 1997).

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