Borders, margins, and peripheries have been the subject of much scrutiny and revalorization across different disciplines in recent years. Postmodernist and poststructuralist theories (Jameson; Hutcheon) have helped deconstruct the notions of center and margin as natural and immutable relations of subordination, while postcolonial critics (Bhabha; Spivak) and global studies scholars (García Canclini; Castells) have accentuated the rich cultural hybridities that occur at borders and peripheries, which can actually impact, subvert, or transform the center. In the field of international relations, Noel Parker's The Geopolitics of Europe's Identity has proposed a “theory of positive marginality” (11) that highlights the potential for margins and peripheries to transcend their marginal status and use their position to their advantage. From an epistemological perspective, the wider range of peripheral visions can offer a more complete picture that goes beyond the narrow and confining viewpoint of the center.

Anthropologist James W. Fernandez has been a proponent of “peripheral vision” as a corrective, complementary, and fuller perspective to the central hegemonic vision: “In the most elementary and redundant sense, peripheral wisdom is awareness of the peripheries by active displacement to peripheral perspectives, enabling thereby the necessary and recurrent dialectic of identities with fully centred (not to say egocentric) wisdom” (140). His critical position is formulated on a series of basic assumptions:

For Fernandez, the center/periphery dialectic is a constant in human relations and exchanges, although subject to reorganization, which may involve different articulations of power that are not necessarily geographically determined: