what is a world? by pheng cheah

7/26/2019 What is a World? by Pheng Cheah

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what is a world?


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what is a world?


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Frontispiece: William Kentridge or Te Reusal o ime, 2012 (detail). Courtesy theartist.


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what is a world?

Durham and London 2016


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2016 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States o Americaon acid-ree paper

Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan

ypeset in Minion Pro by Westchester

Publishing Services

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cheah, Pheng, author.

What is a world? : on postcolonial literature as world

literature / Pheng Cheah.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical reerences and index.

978-0-8223-6078-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-6092-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-7453-4 (e-book)

1. Postcolonialism. 2. Literature and society.

3. Literature and globalization. 4. Literature,

ModernHistory and criticism. I. itle.

56.55544 2016

809'.05dc232015028568

Cover art: William Kentridge, video still rom Te

Reusal o ime, 2012. 5-channel video installation with

breathing machine. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman

Gallery (New York, Paris, London), Goodman Gallery

(Johannesburg, Cape own) and Lia Rumma Gallery

(Naples, Milan).


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vii

Missed Encounters: Cosmopolitanism, World

Literature, and Postcoloniality 1

. Te World o World Literature in Question

1 Te New World Literature: Literary Studies Discovers

Globalization 23

2 Te World According to Hegel: Culture and Power

in World History 46

3 Te World as Market: Te Materialist Inversion o Spiritualist Models

o the World 60

. Worlding and Unworlding: Worldliness, Narrative,

and Literature in Phenomenology and Deconstruction

4 Worlding: Te Phenomenological Concept o Worldliness

and the Loss o World in Modernity 95

5 Te In-Between World: Anthropologizing the Force o Worlding 131

6 Te Arriving World: Te Inhuman Otherness o imeas Real Messianic Hope 161

.O Other Worlds to Come

7 Postcolonial Openings: How Postcolonial Literature Becomes

World Literature 191

8 Projecting a Future World rom the Memory o Precolonial ime 216


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9 World Heritage Preservation and the Expropriation

o Subaltern Worlds 246

10 Resisting Humanitarianization 278

Without Conclusion: Stories without End(s) 310

333

369

383


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Even though it puts into question the equation o the world with the spatial

extensiveness o the globe, a book that takes as its subject something as large as

the world and literatures relation to the world is necessarily the product o

intellectual conversations that have stretched across the globe. Special thanks

to Jonathan Culler, Elizabeth Grosz, and David Wang Der-wei or reading the

manuscript, Benedict Anderson and Caroline Hau or invaluable eedback on

the epilogue, Wendy Larson or her insightul comments on chapter 7, and

Zachary Manredi or his careul reading o chapters 4 and 5. Peter Fenves and

Simon Gikandi were exemplary manuscript reviewers. Tis book is stronger be-

cause o their incisive comments. Nuruddin Farah and Amitav Ghosh patiently

answered actual questions about their writing.

Earlier versions o chapters were presented at the Beijing Foreign Lan-

guages University, Binghamton University, Birkbeck, University o London,the University o British Columbia, Cornell University, Ehwa Womans Uni-

versity, Florida State University, Georgetown University, Goldsmiths, University o

London, the University o Hong Kong, Indiana University, the University

o Wisconsin at Madison, the University o Manchester, National Chung-hsing

University, National aiwan University, the National University o Singapore,

New York University, Northwestern University, the University o Oregon at

Eugene, Oxord University, Peking University, the University o Pennsylvania,

Seoul National University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Stanord Univer-sity, Tammasat University, the University o Washington at Seattle, and the

University o Zrich. I would like to thank my interlocutors on these occa-

sions, especially Samuel Weber, Susannah Gottlieb, Costas Douzinas, J. Hillis

Miller, Andrea Riemenschnitter, Rita Felski, Ramon Saldivar, Dai Jinhua,

Franco Moretti, David Damrosch, Haun Saussy, Annu Jalais, Elizabeth

Anker, Natalie Melas, Robert Young, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Sneja Gunew,

Ankhi Mukherjee, Elleke Boehmer, Alessia Ricciardi, Vicente Raael, Lau-

rie Sears, Walter Cohen, Neil Saccamano, Leslie Adelson, Robin Goodman,

Vinay Dharwadker, Susan Stanord Friedman, Robert Guay, Jini Kim Watson,


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viii

Chris Berry, Gina Marchetti, Jackie Stacey, Felicia Chan, Gyan Prakash, Lisa

Roel, David Goldberg, Sven rakulhun, Ralph Weber, Sanjay Subrahmanyam,

Chris Lee, Mary Bryson, Hector Hoyos, Jed Esty, Simon Richter, Liao Hsien-hao,

Guy Beauregard, Bennett Fu, Chiu Kuei-en, Tanet Aphornsuvan, Visarut

Phungsoondara, Yukti Mukdawijitra, Lamia Karim, Claudia Berger, Eileen Ju-

lien, Benjamin Robinson, Jonathan Elmer, Kenneth Dean, Peggy Cho, Kang

Woosung, Chon Sooyoung, and Nicole Rizzuto.

I received research support rom my home institution, the University o

Caliornia at Berkeley, in the orm o a ownsend Center Initiative Grant

or Associate Proessors in the spring o 2007. My thanks to Gillian Hart, my

aculty counterpart, who patiently listened to my critique o critical geograph-

ical theories o the world. I also received a Humanities Research Fellowship or

the spring and all o 2008. My thanks to Janet Broughton, Humanities Dean

at that time, or acilitating the research leave. Colleagues at Berkeley who

have given me intellectual sustenance during the writing o this book include

Suzanne Guerlac, Deniz Gkturk, Martin Jay, ony Kaes, Hsing You-tien,

rinh Minh-ha, Michael Mascuch, David Cohen, Candace Slater, and Charles

Briggs. I also thank my editor, Courtney Berger, or her cheerul attentiveness

and help.

Quite appropriately, much o this book was written in Asia. I am grateul

or the research support I received rom the Asia Research Institute at theNational University o Singapore, where I was visiting research proessor rom

August 2012 to August 2013 and rom the School o English at the University

o Hong Kong, where I have been a visiting research proessor in the summer

months since May 2012. Prasenjit Duara was an exemplary host as Director o

the Asia Research Institute, and Chua Beng Huat was a wonderul leader o

the Cultural Studies Research Cluster. Te intellectual riendships that were

ormed and strengthened with Wendy Larson, Bill Callahan, Andrea Riemen-

schnitter, Lim Song Hwee, and Felicia Chan during my year in Singapore willalways be an important part o my scholarly lie. Te University o Hong Kong

School o English has been a second institutional home. Elaine Ho, Chris

Hutton, Douglas Kerr, Wendy Gan, and Adam Jaworksi have been extremely

congenial colleagues.

Te book draws on material previously published in the ollowing arti-

cles: What Is a World? On World Literature as Cosmopolitanism, in special

issue on cosmopolitanism, Daedalus 137, no. 3 (summer 2008), 2638 (re-

printed in Routledge Handbook o Cosmopolitan Studies, ed. Gerard Delanty

(London: Routledge, 2012), 13849 (reprinted by permission o Routledge),


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ix

World against Globe: oward a Normative Conception o World Literature,

New Literary History45, no. 3 (summer 2014), 30329, and O Other Worlds

to Come, in Delimiting Modernities: Conceptual Challenges and Regional

Responses, ed. Sven rakulhun and Ralph Weber (Lanham, MD: Lexington

Books, 2015), 323.


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Missed Encounters

Cosmopolitanism, World Literature, and Postcoloniality

In a recent video installation, Te Reusal o ime, the South Arican artist Wil-liam Kentridge brilliantly captures a key premise o this book: the hierarchical

ordering and control o the world as we know it is based on technologies o

temporal calculation. Kentridge shows how the cartographical organization

o the capitalist world-system relies on Northern- and Eurocentric regimes

o temporal measurement. Te subordination o all regions o the globe to

Greenwich Mean ime as the point zero or the synchronization o clocks is a

synecdoche or European colonial domination o the rest o the world because

it enables a mapping that places Europe at the worlds center. Tis tethering to

the uniorm march o European standard time is a orm o imprisonment that

smothers lived local temporalities (see this books rontispiece).

Te perection o chronometers had long been the aim o geographers, to

x more precisely the positions o islands and continents in relation to Eu-

rope. With the spread o cables under sea and over land, that ollowed the

development o electric telegraphy, time was taken rom the master clocks

o London and Paris and sent to the colonies.

Te lines on maps were miniature renderings o the real lines o cablesthat snaked round continents, or drew great arcs across the oors o oceans.

Sending and receiving stations ollowed the cable and marked the end o

lines tethering the center to the satellite colony. Te clock and the colonial

observatory completed the mapping o the world.

Te strings o cables, these birds nests o copper, turned the world into

a giant switchboard, or commerce and control. Te world was covered by a

huge dented bird cage o time zones, o liens o agreement o control, all

sent out by the clock rooms o Europe. Local suns were shifed urther and

urther rom local zeniths.


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2

In a section entitled Blowing up the Meridian, Kentridge suggests that all acts

o resistance to colonial rule are revolts against the pervasive control o im-

posed European time. Tey express the demand Give us back our Sun. As i

blowing up a train line could blow up the pendulum o the European clock,

which swung over every head.In colonial terms, this reusal was a reusal o

the European sense o order imposed by time zones: not only literally, but this

reusal also reerred metaphorically to other orms o control as well.

Te mapping o the world by temporal calculations is premised on a con-

ceptualization o the world as a spatial category, namely, an object o the great-

est possible spatial extension that can be divided into zones o quantitatively

measurable time. World, however, is originally a temporal category. Beore the

world can appear as an object, it must rst be. A world only is and we are only

worldly beings i there is already time. Te unity and permanence o a world

are thus premised on the persistence o time. Tis book explores how the con-

ceptualization o the world in temporal terms provides a normative basis or

transorming the world made by capitalist globalization and how this norma-

tive understanding o the world leads to a radical rethinking o world litera-

ture as literature that is an active power in the making o worlds, that is, both

a site o processes o worlding and an agent that participates and intervenes in

these processes.

My redenition o world literature has two main implications. First, it ori-ents world literature so that it addresses a undamental contradiction o the

modern capitalist world-system. As Marx pointed out, the globalization o capi-

tal creates the material conditions or a community o the greatest possible

extension. However, the capitalist world-system also radically undermines the

achievement o a human community o global reach, that is, a genuine unity

o the world. For Marx, the world is a normative category that exceeds the

global market. Tis book explores the normative dimension o worldliness

rom the perspective o narrative literature rom the postcolonial South thatattempts to remake the world against capitalist globalization.

Second, understanding world literature as a world-making activity clari-

es the connections it has to cosmopolitanism that existing scholarship has

obscured. Modern cosmopolitanism has largely been an affair o philosophy

and the social sciences. Whether one thinks o the ideal ethical projects o

worldwide solidarity o the eighteenth-century Frenchphilosophesor Kant,

or o more recently emerging discourses o new cosmopolitanism in our era

o economic globalization, transnational migration, and global communica-

tions, literature appears to have little pertinence to the ormulation o norma-


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tive cosmopolitan principles or the regulation o institutional actors on the

global stage or to the study o the prolierating associations and networks that

envelop the entire globe. Indeed, cosmopolitanist discourse seems only to reer

to literature in disparagement. Kant rets that his teleological account o world

history, which aims to establish a world ederation o states, will be taken or

a anciul ction: It is admittedly a strange and at rst sight absurd proposi-

tion to write a historyaccording to an idea o how world events must develop

i they are to conorm to certain rational ends; it would seem that only a novel

could result rom such a perspective [Absicht].A cosmopolitan vision can-

not be expressed in literary representation because literature can only render

an ideal picture that has at best a tenuous relation to the world.

Contemporary theories o world literature have been equally hesitant about

connecting world literature to cosmopolitanism perhaps because they have

identied cosmopolitanism with an abstract universal normative view o the

ideal unity o the world, whereas they are concerned with how literary texts

attain worldliness as a result o the establishment o multiple concrete attach-

ments through circulation.Te deeper reason or the missed encounter be-

tween world literature and cosmopolitanism is that neither eld o study has

careully examined the key concept common to them, the world. Cosmopoli-

tanism is about viewing onesel as part o a world, a circle o political belonging

that transcends the limited ties o kinship and country to embrace the wholeo deterritorialized humanity. However, since one cannot seethe universe, the

world, or humanity, the cosmopolitan optic is not one o perceptual experi-

ence. It should be evident that we should not take the presentation o the world

or granted because, at the very least, it is given to us by the imagination.

Teories o world literature take the concept o world or granted in a di-

erent way. Tey equate the world with circulatory movements that cut across

national-territorial borders. Tey are primarily concerned with the impact o

these spatial movements on the production, reception, and interpretationo literary texts instead o world literatures impact qua literature on the world.

As I will show, they reduce the world literatures normative orce to the barest

minimum.

Cartographies o the Spatial World

My account o world literature as a orce o world-making should be distin-

guished rom two other intellectual approaches to the world: the argument in

literary studies that literature constitutes a possible world and the view that


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each discipline o knowledge produces its own cartography o the world. Te

rst approach draws on the theory o possible worlds rom analytical philoso-

phy and ormal semantics to correct the excessive ormalism o structural-

ist approaches to literature that dispense with literary reerence and thematic

content. It argues that literature creates a world, a totality with its own con-

sistency, by appropriating elements rom the reerential world. As Tomas

Pavel puts it, reed rom the constraints o the textualist approach, theory o

ction can respond again to the world-creating powers o imagination and

account or the properties o ctional existence and worlds, their complex-

ity, incompleteness, remoteness, and integration within the general economy

o culture.Although this approach suggests that literature, especially realist

literature, has the power o creating a world, the literary worlds ontological

status is one o virtuality. It depicts a genuinely possible alternative to the

actual world qua base.Hence, although literature does not just reect the ac-

tual world, its creativity is not a causal power in the actual world. It is limited

to the construction through diegesis and mimesis o a world with suffi cient

consistency in its events to be a possible world.

In the second approach, a given discipline projects a cartographical image

o the world according to specic criteria and principles o knowledge- and

inormation-production. A mapping o the world in political economy may

highlight global capital investment ows, whereas an anthropological map-ping may emphasize migration ows. Tese cartographies divide the globe

up hierarchically and map relations o power and inequality. Tey have an

important impact on human existence, especially its social, economic, and

political dimensions. For example, the cartography o the Failed States Index

o the Fund or Peace is intended to promote greater stability worldwide by

giving early warning to the international community about weak and ailing

states that pose a threat to global security so that effective policies can be

ormulated.

Such cartographies can have a critical edge. Public international law schol-

arship has highlighted the trajectory o the spread o international law and

human rights rom European colonial expansion in the Americas, Arica, and

the Pacic, with its hierarchical assumptions o civilizational, religious,

and national differences, to the contemporary United Nations system with its

regime o international human rights law based on the principles o national

sovereignty and individualism.In a more methodologically progressive vein,

anthropologists o inter-Asia have urged us to move beyond the territorial

nation-state-bounded dynamics o anti-imperial discourse and study the


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thick transnationalism o transregional networks across Asia. It is argued that

research o an intermediate scale above the nation-state and below the world-

system will help us evade the abstractions o global analysis and the myopic

ocus on minute detail yielded by local studies within a nation-state rame.

Intermediate-level interconnections created by religious movements, diaspo-

ras, trade exchanges, artistic production, and relocations exceed and escape

the homogenizing, totalizing tendency o global orces. Tey generate rictions

and offer immanent resources or resisting Northern- and Western-centric

capitalist globalization.

Recent theories o world literature employ a similar cartographical approach,

although they do not approach the sophistication and suppleness o anthropo-

logical analyses o transnational networks and ows. As I will show in this

books rst chapter, these theories map ows o literary exchange across na-

tional boundaries and through global circuits. Tey dene the world in terms

o the circulation o commodities, that is, as the expression, eld, and product

o transnational market exchange. Te world is a spatial category, determined

solely in terms o extension. Although there are merits to understanding liter-

ary phenomena beyond the nation-state ramework, the undamental short-

coming o equating the world with a global market is that it assumes that

globalization creates a world. his leads to a restricted understanding o

the relation between literature and capitalist globalization that places lit-erature in a reactive position. Instead o exploring what literature can con-

tribute to an understanding o the world and its possible role in remaking

the world in contemporary globalization, theories o world literature have

ocused on the implications o global circulation or the study o literature.

Tey have turned away rom questions about literatures worldly causality and

avoided examining the normative dimension o worldliness. Tis book seeks

to ask more o literature: Is there a normative worldly orce immanent to lit-

erature? What are its key eatures?

A Normative Teory o World Literature: emporalizing the World

Tis book develops a normative theory o world literature. By this, I mean

an account o world literature that does not merely describe and analyze

how literary works circulate around the world or are produced with a global

market in mind but that seeks to understand the normative orce that litera-

ture can exert in the world, the ethicopolitical horizon it opens up or the

existing world. Tis requires careul elucidation o both terms in the phrase


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normative orce. Normativity reers to what ought to be. We convention-

ally understand norms and their related cognate, values, as ideals that practi-

cal reason prescriptively projects onto reality to transorm it in the image o

human ends or as principles immanent to collective human existence that will

unold and actualize themselves. Te orce o a norm comes rom its universal

validity. A norm with universal orce can move human agents to worldly ac-

tion. Te normative orce o world literature reers to its power or effi cacy to

change the world according to a normative ethicopolitical horizon. Tis con-

cept o normativity inorms all spiritualist accounts o the world. o take the

most pertinent example, in his inaugural account o world literature, Goethe

argued that the literary products o different nations are the diverse mani-

estations and expressions o an ideal universal humanity and the normative

vocation o world literary exchange is to reveal this underlying ideal.

As opposed to a descriptive theory, a normative theory o world literature

is based on an understanding o the world as a temporal category. Here we

should take a lea rom Goethe, who characterized the worlds normativity

in temporal terms. Although wider human intercourse is initially enabled by

material connections, literary exchange generates a spiritual world that tran-

scends spatial networks. Te members o this higher world hope that in due

time, through historical progress, the ideal humanity that literary intercourse

reveals will be actualized in the existing world. Te rst two parts o this bookelucidate the normative orce o world literature by means o two temporal

concepts: teleological timeand worlding.

Since its inception, the normative project o Weltliteratur has been aug-

mented by teleologies o history that see the world as the horizon o humanitys

universal historical progress toward the normative end o reedom. oday, tele-

ology is viewed as an outmoded and even pernicious way o thinking because

it constrains history by prescribing a universal end. Strictly speaking, however,

teleology is simply the doctrine that events in the world are driven by imma-nent ends. Any kind o rational human action, or example means-ends rela-

tions and nal causality, is teleological. A teleological world history under-

stands the worlds normativity in terms o teleological time, a phrase I have

adapted rom Amihud Gileads provocative argument that Kants Tird Cri-

tique establishes a systematic unity between time and teleology.eleological

time is the time o incarnation in which rational ends are actualized in the

empirical world. It unctions to bridge the mechanical natural world and the

realm o reedom, dened as a sphere o rational spontaneity that character-

izes the rational human beings power o sel-determination. As distinguished


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rom the linear time o mechanical causality that governs nature, where cause

and effect ollow each other in an irreversible sequence o succession, teleo-

logical time is circular and sel-returning. Final causality is the actualization

o a rational end in existence. In a teleological history, the end or nal cause is

not external but originally immanent to its effect. Its effect is the unolding o,

the return to, and the completion o an immanent end. In a modern mechanis-

tic worldview, where all ends are externally prescribed by human reason, the

only possible example o nal causality in nature is the temporal structure o

a living organisms causality as a sel-organizing being in which its very lie is

generated by a complete reciprocity between parts and whole such that they

are both the cause and effect o each other. Because an organisms epigenetic

processes resemble the nal causality o human reason, the entire tradition o

German idealism viewed the teleological time o organic lie as an apposite ana-

logue or human reedom and saw this resemblance as grounds or the hope

that human actors can actualize moral ends in the world.Accordingly, human

cultural progress (Bildung) was understood in terms o teleological time. As

evidenced by its teleological view o historical progress, Marxist materialism

inherits this legacy.

Te contemporary distrust or teleology is ofen part o a larger critique o

normativity that questions the coercive and exclusionary character o univer-

salistic ideas o humanity and their historical alignment with class exploita-tion, patriarchal domination, Eurocentrism, and Western imperialism. In his

critique o the ethical and moral ideals o bourgeois philosophy such as civil

and human rights, Marx characterized these norms as ideological abstrac-

tions generated by the autonomization o reason rom concrete material lie.

Notwithstanding this qualication, a normative horizon remains in Marxs

materialist account o the world, namely, the universal ulllment o concrete

human needs by the cooperative social regulation o productive orces.

Unlike the discursive cartographies o the social sciences and recent ac-counts o world literature, cartographies o the world generated by teleologi-

cal time are patently normative. Chapters 2 and 3 o the book examine how

Hegelian idealism and Marxist materialism conceptualize the world within

the eschato-teleological ramework o universal progress. For example, the

world proletarian revolution is the end o human history in two senses. It is

the highest achievement o historical progress, the ullest development o

historys rational purpose, and also its terminal horizon, the point at which

history concludes because there is nothing else to be achieved. Here, the

worlds normative orce is the transcendence o temporal nitude and the


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creation o a higher world by rational human action that overcomes the par-

ticularity and limitations o the present world.

In describing worlding (welten), the second temporal concept I use to con-

struct my normative theory o world literature, normative orce must be

used with even greater qualication. Unlike teleological time, worlding, which

originates rom Heideggerian phenomenology, has some currency in literary

theory. It reers to how a world is held together and given unity by the orce

o time. In giving rise to existence, temporalization worlds a world. Gayatri

Spivak introduced the term to postcolonial theory as shorthand to describe

how European imperialist cultural representations constructed the geography

o colonies. Tese processes o imperialist discursive cartography, which in-

clude canonical literature, are a orm o epistemic violence that shapes how

colonized subjects see themselves. Tese processes continue to play a role in

the worlding o the Tird World and its native inhabitants afer decoloniza-

tion.Spivak reerred to Heideggers essay Te Origin o the Work o Artas the

source o the idea o the worlding o a world upon what must be assumed to

be uninscribed earth and drew an analogy between worlding and imperialist

cartography.Imperialism inscribed worlds that were inhabited prior to Eu-

ropean conquest as the uninhabited space o terra nullius. Accordingly, when

the Heideggerian concept-metaphor o earth and world is used to describe

the imperialist project, what emerges out o the violence o the rif . . . is themultiarious thingliness o a represented world on a map.

Spivak acknowledges that postcolonial theorys use o worlding is a

vulgarization. Indeed, her analogy obscures what is truly valuable about

Heideggers concept or understanding the relation between world literature

and globalization. Chapters 46 explore the concepts implications through a

study o Heidegger, Arendt, and Derrida. For Heidegger, a world is precisely

what cannot be represented on a map. Worlding is not a cartographical pro-

cess that epistemologically constructs the world by means o discursive repre-sentations but a process o temporalization. Cartography reduces the world

to a spatial object. In contradistinction, worlding is a orce that subtends and

exceeds all human calculations that reduce the world as a temporal structure

to the sum o objects in space. Imperialist cartography is a calculation in the

sphere o geopolitical economy that objecties the world as a temporal pro-

cess. It constructs a world insoar as its discursive representations enable us

to determine and shape the world that temporalization opens up. Processes

o discursive construction are worldings in a derived sense. Tey imbue the

objective world with value and signicance. But they are also processes o


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unworlding because by reducing the world to something spatial, they obscure

its worldliness.

Te relation between teleological time and worlding is as ollows: teleo-

logical time worlds in the narrow sense by spiritually and materially shap-

ing the world through the prescription o normative ends. o return again

to the example o Marx, the proletarian revolution is a progressive orce that

intervenes in the existing world, reinscribing it through alternative discursive

constructions in order to actualize a higher world. However, worlding in the

derived sense presupposes worlding in the general sense, the prevailing o a

world that ollows rom the sheer persistence o time. Te world is linked to

transcendence. But unlike teleological accounts, the world is not generated

by the transcendence o nitude. Instead, time itsel is the orce o transcen-

dence that opens a world. Better yet, temporalization constitutes the openness

o a world, the opening that is world. In situations where progressive teleolog-

ical cartographies are leveled off by capitalist globalization, this openness is an

unerasable normative resource or disrupting and resisting the calculations o

globalization. It opens up new progressive teleological times.

My characterization o worlding as a normative orce is almost a catachre-

sis, the use o a phrase because o the lack o better words that puts its usual

meaning under erasure. Heideggers account o the world not only problema-

tizes the concepts o causality and orce. It is also a sharp critique o teleologyand normative value because it rejects the view o the world as a human com-

munity in which rational subjects give meaning to objective reality by prescrib-

ing values and norms. eleological time is a rational calculation and appropria-

tion o time that reshapes time in the image o human reason by suggesting that

the historical course o worldly events is in harmony with the nal causality

o human action. In contradistinction, Heidegger argues that the emergence

o the rational subject as the giver o normative value is premised on tempo-

ral processes that precede and exceed the human subject. We can only createnormative value i we exist in a world with other beings and have access to

them. Te uniying power o temporalization is precisely a orce o worlding,

the precipitous ushering into a world, a meaningul whole that brings all be-

ings into relation. When we xate on values and norms, we obscure this prior

meaningulness and reduce other beings to what is valuable or us. Insoar as

it precedes the rational subject rom which normative value originates, world-

ing is not a normative process. Yet it also has everything to do with normativ-

ity because without this opening that puts all beings into relation, we would

not have access to other beings and no value could be ormed. Worlding is a


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normative orce because it gives rise to the totality o meaningul relations

that is the ontological condition or the production o values and norms.

Arendts revision o Heideggers idea o worlding suggests that natality, the

orce by which we come into the world, is the ground o our world-making

capacities. As ree subjects, we have the power to begin something new and to

abricate the world through our actions. Whereas Heidegger and Arendt view

the destruction o world in capitalist modernity as a all rom an authentic

condition, Derrida suggests that the relation between worlding in the general

and narrow senses is aporetic. Worlding in the general sense carries with it the

irreducible risk o unworlding because rational agents are guided by deter-

minative calculations that speciy the worlds direction. However, because all

calculations presuppose the persistence o time and this is incalculable, every

unworlding points to the irreducible possibility o the opening o another

world. As the basis o (un)worlding, the incalculable gif o time is a principle

o real messianic hope immanent to the world.

What then is the connection between literature and the normative orce

o worlding such that we can speak o world literature as literature that worlds

a world? Here the distinction between the two senses o worlding is crucial.

Te spiritualist and idealist accounts o the world (Goethe, Kant, and Hegel) I

discuss in chapters 1 and 2 suggest that as an aesthetic and cultural process, lit-

erature creates a higher spiritual world. In contradistinction, Marxs materialistaccount o the world, the subject o chapter 3, poses an insurmountable ob-

stacle to world literature. By characterizing spiritual products as phantomatic

superstructures that are devoid o effi cacy in making the real world, Marx de-

prives literature o any worldly normative orce. Marxist critical theories o

space and critical geography (Leebvre and Harvey) go some way toward a ma-

terialist understanding o literatures power to shape the world through repre-

sentational cartography because they offer a dynamic account o the making

o space that gives an important role to cultural and aesthetic processes. How-ever, in the nal analysis, this shaping is directed at the world as something

spatial. It is worlding in the narrow sense. In contradistinction, literature has

a more undamental relation to the world in phenomenological and postphe-

nomenological accounts. Te worlds reality is neither objective nor subjective

because it is a process grounded in the orce o temporalization. Literature

has a similarly curious ontological status: it is not something objective and so

cannot be reduced to the subjects rational powers o determination and

calculation. Te radical indeterminacy o literatures meaning also means that

it exceeds the subjects powers o interpretation. Hence, literature does not


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merely map the spatialized world and give it value and meaning. Rather, its

ormal structures enact the opening o a world by the incalculable gif o time.

We may thereore speak o the world as having a literary structure that is

more undamental, more inrastructural, to adopt Marxs language, than the

material reality o economic production. For the early Heidegger, literature

discloses how temporalization holds the world together because it is a mean-

ingul whole that is prior to the subject. Arendt and Derrida connect this

literary structure to action in their respective elaborations o it as a web o

stories without an author and the condition o possibility o narrative that

opens a world.

Understanding world literature in terms o literatures connection to world-

ing and the coming o time points to immanent resources or resisting capi-

talist globalization. Capitalist accumulation needs and takes time. Capital is

augmented by rational technologies and calculations that appropriate and man-

age time or the maximal extraction o surplus value. But capital can neither

give itsel time nor destroy it and, moreover, does not want to destroy it. Tis

means that an irreducible principle o real messianic hope is always structural

to capitalist globalization. Te persistence o time is inrastructural to capital

and cannot be destroyed. As an enactment o the opening o worlds by the

coming o time, world literature points to something that will always exceed

and disrupt capital.My discussion o spiritualist, materialist, and phenomenological accounts

o the world is intended as a progression toward a richer understanding o

literatures worldliness. A later account o the world does not invalidate prior

accounts but critically supplements them. We can then view a given work o

world literature as the locus where different processes o worlding are played

out in a historically specic eld o orces, and we can analyze the complex

relations, antagonisms, and aporetic tensions between these processes.

Postcolonial World Literature: A Critique o Heterotemporality

Te third part o the book introduces a third term to the encounter between

cosmopolitanism and world literature: postcoloniality. Literature o the post-

colonial South is an important modality o world literature dened as litera-

ture that worlds and makes a world because the sharp inequalities created

by capitalist globalization and their devastating consequences or the masses

o postcolonial societies make the opening o other worlds a matter o the

greatest imperativity. Put another way, the tension between cosmopolitanism


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and globalization, world and globe, is most acute in postcoloniality because

ar rom holding a world together, capitalist globalization incorporates peo-

ples outside the European world-system by violently destroying their worlds.

Unlike teleologies o world history, the unity at stake here is not that o the

whole o humanity. It is more modest and ragile: the gathering- and holding-

together that maintains a place o habitation in the ace o the leveling violence

o global technologies o temporal calculation. Te survival o these worlds is

necessary to the constitution o a larger world o humanity that is truly plural.

For more than a decade, critical social science concerned with the postco-

lonial South has been arguing that the world is made up o multiple tempo-

ralities that can only be liberated by exploding Western capitalist modernitys

linear time. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a sociologist o international law

and an active participant in the World Social Forum, suggests that we need to

replace the monoculture o linear time with the ecology o temporalities

to release alternative realities and generate different experiences o contempo-

raneity. Societies are constituted o various temporalities. Many practices are

disqualied, suppressed, or rendered unintelligible because they are ruled by

temporalities that are not contained in the temporal canon o Western capitalist

modernity. Once these temporalities are recuperated and become known, the

practices and socialities ruled by them become intelligible and credible objects

o argumentation and political debate. Te expansion o the present occurs, inthis case, by the relativization o linear time and the valorization o other tempo-

ralities that may articulate or conict with it.In the humanities, postcolonial

theory has likewise explored the complicities between the teleological time o

Western modernitys universal narrative o progress, colonial violence, and

the linear time o capitalist exploitation. Dipesh Chakrabartys theory o het-

erotemporality suggests that non-Western temporalities coexist with the time

o modern progress and are important resources or resisting and subverting

Western teleological time and the bases o alternative modernities to capitalistglobalization.

We cannot, however, undo the history o Western imperialism and colonial-

ism by nostalgically recuperating romanticized precapitalist pasts. We must in-

stead patiently search or extant resources or reworlding the world. Part III is

devoted to the study o narrative literature rom the postcolonial peripheries

that draws on alternative temporalities rom the Caribbean, the South Asian

subcontinent, Arica, and the Philippines to contest the world created by di-

erent ows o global capital. Michelle Cliff s Clare Savage novels, Amitav

Ghoshs Te Hungry ide, Nuruddin Farahs Gifs, Ninotchka Roscas State o


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War, and imothy Mos Renegade, respectively, track the calculations o sugar

and tourist capital, environmental movements and ecotourism, humanitar-

ian aid, and military and economic neocolonialism in collaboration with the

crony capitalism o a patrimonial state. Despite its reliance on slavery, colo-

nial capital justied itsel as a civilizing mission. United States economic and

military neocolonialism during the Cold War similarly masked itsel under

the name o development within the security ramework o protection rom

communism. Contemporary ows o money, especially humanitarianism and

environmental and world preservation unds, present themselves as attempts

to humanize the world. Te novels studied expose how these global ows

violently destroy worlds despite their humanizing claims. Cliffs Clare Savage

novels, the subject o chapter 8, are concerned with the socioeconomic and

political problems caused in Jamaica by sugar capital and the tourist industry.

Chapter 9 discusses the portrayal o the tragic dispossession o subaltern pop-

ulations rom the Sundarbans by environmental and world heritage preserva-

tion movements in Ghoshs Te Hungry ide. Chapter 10, on Farahs Gifs, is

concerned with humanitarian dehumanization in Somalia: the dehumanizing

impact o transnational humanitarian aid on a receiving people. Te novels by

Rosca and Mo discussed in the epilogue are concerned with the devastating

impact o economic corruption and political authoritarianism in the Philip-

pines under US neocolonialism.Tese novels are examples o literature that seeks to have a worldly causal-

ity in contemporary globalization. With the exception o Renegade, the source

o literatures worldly orce is the heterotemporality o precolonial oral tra-

ditions that have survived the violence o slavery, olk practices, subaltern

rituals and practices o survival, religious ethics, and even the geological

time o the landscape. Although the thesis o heterotemporality presents itsel

as a rejection o the universalizing teleological narrative o Western capitalist

modernity, alternative temporalities are in act varieties o teleological timein a smaller case. Tey are nonuniversal or local teleologies because they

are governed by a dynamic o sel-return in which a given postcolonial people

or social group achieve sel-determination through their own practices. Tey

can be divided into two categories: revolutionary time, where the cultivation

o a revolutionary consciousness takes place with the aim o transorming a

given country rom a subordinate part o the homogeneous abstract space o

the global capitalist system into a place o belonging where local populations

and groups can reely thrive (Cliff and Rosca), and worldly ethics, the ethos or

practice o inhabiting a world with others in a conjuncture where the world


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is constantly being eroded by global processes and revolutionary transor-

mation is no longer a plausible alternative (Ghosh, Farah, and Mo). Certain

orms o cultural and linguistic translation, relations o generous giving that

respect the sel-determination o the recipient, practices o care and concern

or others, and above all the telling and receiving o stories are important ele-

ments o worldly ethics.

My studies o these novels are examples o how to analyze world literature

as the interplay o different processes o worlding. I take issue with the theory

o heterotemporality by arguing that the alternative teleologies enacted by the

novels are undamentally problematic. Because their attempts at reworlding

are repeatedly undermined by global and national capitalist calculations, the

heterotemporalities they stage can only be sustained by conjuring with the in-

calculable and inhuman gif o time as the original opening o a world. Tese

novels are obsessed with the story. With the help o Benjamins essay on the sto-

ryteller, the epilogue speculates on the connection between storytelling and

nitude that makes the story the most appropriate narrative orm or com-

municating the openness o world.

Te organization o this book can give the wrong impression o a division

o labor between European philosophy and literature rom the postcolonial

South, where postcolonial literary texts have the subordinate unction o illus-

trating the ontological and normative problems concerning worldliness thatEuropean philosophy elaborates. In act, no such division exists. Tis is a work

o literary theory where I study philosophical conceptions o world that are in-

suffi ciently theorized or simply missing in existing theories o world litera-

ture in order to construct a normative theory o world literature. My analyses

o postcolonial world literature are not merely examples o this theory. Tey

inect and deepen the theory by exploring concrete postcolonial sites where

the opening o new worlds is o the greatest urgency. Te philosophical and

literary texts are concerned with the same issues o the worlds reality, literaturesworldly orce, and the corrosive impact o (colonial and neocolonial) global

modernity on the temporalities o human worlds, especially the exclusionary

character o communities in globalization. Tus, each chapter in parts I and II

contains a discussion o literatures place in a given philosophical conception

o the world. Conversely, there is a striking intertextual resonance between the

novels studied in part III and the philosophical ideas o world explored in

earlier chapters. For example, Rilke, whose poetry ascinated Heidegger and

Arendt, provides much o the conceptual vocabulary and imagery o Amitav

Ghoshs Te Hungry ide, thereby indicating the pertinence o the idea o


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worlding to ethicopolitical problems in the postcolonial world. Indeed, the

impact o the history o colonialism on literary and intellectual production

has made it impossible to clearly separate Europe rom the postcolonial world

and to say dogmatically that texts produced in different places do not share

thematic and stylistic continuities and enter into debate with each other. exts

rom different disciplinary discourses are part o world literature in the nar-

row sense.

My characterization o postcolonial literature as world literature will inevi-

tably ace objections. I experienced such resistance directly when I taught a

graduate seminar on postcolonial world literature or the English Department

o the University o Caliornia, Berkeley, in the spring o 2009 that was largely

based on the plan o this book. We read many o the European philosophi-

cal and postcolonial literary texts I discuss later. Te seminar had a healthy

enrollment o students rom various humanities departments. Te comments

in course evaluations by graduate students in English were worrying.Although

they all ound the theoretical part o the class stimulating, they complained

about the literature. One student wrote: Te novels themselves ofen seemed

wanting. Another student, who planned to study nineteenth- to twentieth-

century American poetry, commented: Te novels were less interesting as they

mostly thematized issues about world. I could think o many more interesting

pieces o ction / poetry to be read alongside this strong theoretical oundation.In the end, this class was successul at enabling me to think o aesthetics in a

broader way. Another similar comment read: Teoretical readings or the class

were great. . . . Te novels were a different matter. Some were not very good

and one had the eeling that more interesting work could have been assigned.

Te harshest criticism was that the literature chosen or the course was quite

requently terrible and insuffi ciently motivated under the rubric o the course

to warrant overlooking that poor quality. Tere are many novels that would

be applicable to the concept that are not pieces o worthless garbage rom astrictly aesthetic viewpoint (this is not a subjective judgment but rather an

objective evaluation that claims universality).

Tese comments are disturbing because we read authors who are widely

celebrated. V. S. Naipaul is a Nobel laureate, and Farah is rumored to be a

perennial Nobel contender. Ghosh, Cliff, and Mo are regarded as strong ex-

amples o world literature. My students comments are patently Eurocentric.

Tey avor European philosophy and dismiss literature about the non-Western

world by writers o non-Western origins. Teir criticisms include the charge

that seminar discussion had ocused too much on thematic issues at the


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expense o literary orm. Teme is implicitly associated with the crudeness

and simplicity o postcolonial politics and orm with universal aesthetic value.

Here, the assertion o objective aesthetic judgment with universal validity is

clearly an expression o the arrogance o what Gayatri Spivak has called the

sanctioned ignorance o the culture o imperialism.

What precisely counts as interesting rom a literary standpoint? In terms

o thematic content, I would have thought that ethical and political issues aris-

ing rom the impact o contemporary global capitalism on a large part o the

worlds population would be o interest in a seminar on contemporary world

literature. But this would require readers to step outside their comort zones

o amiliarity with canonical English literature and learn more about other

parts o the world, especially rom nonliterary discourses. Without this effort,

we cannot grasp that these material conditions are part o the processes o

worlding in which the novels are immersed and which they participate in and

actively contest. Moreover, the sharp separation o aesthetic orm rom reer-

ential content is dogmatic and reductive. Te ormal eatures o these novels

or example, the kind o realism employed or the genre, rhetorical orms, and

narrative style o a literary workemerge in response to the social and po-

litical issues that are thematized. Indeed, their ormal aspects ofen present

solutions to their thematic concerns. Because the central problem o how to

remake a world being destroyed by capitalist globalization reers us to theliterary structure o worlding, literary orm is precisely where the orce and

ground o worldly intervention is intimated.

Here some comments about my choice o novels are in order. Te theory

o world literature I propose suggests that the world is a normative temporal

category and not the spatial whole made by globalization. Because world lit-

erature has the normative vocation o opening new worlds, its study cannot

merely consist o historiographical or sociological analyses o how literary

texts circulate globally and the effects o circulation at the level o orm andstyle. Tis does not, however, mean that literature that thematizes or repre-

sents globalization is not world literature in the normative sense. o the con-

trary, I have chosen literary narratives concerned with the world-destroying

consequences o various modalities o capitalist globalization in order to show

that the opening o new worlds against the globalizing grain is something

real that remains even in the most devastating scenarios such as the incapaci-

tation o an aid-receiving people by humanitarianism or the destruction o

subaltern worlds by world-heritage preservation and ecotourist capital. In the

rst place, a thematic portrayal or mapping o globalization is not merely a


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passive reaction that reects and conrms the status quo. It can also be a orm

o critical resistance that brings the attention o the wider world to the plight

o peoples impacted by global orces and their struggles to saeguard a uture

or their worlds.

More important, because the novels I study are interested in alternative tem-

poralities, they traffi c with the opening o worlds by the gif o time in their

intense preoccupation with questions o narrativity and time. Tey thereby

oreground the act that the orce o worlding is immanent to and subtends glo-

balization. It would be utopian to claim that the opening o new worlds in post-

coloniality can occur through a clean break rom global processes. Tis is my

critique o the theory o heterotemporality. Rather, the opening o new worlds

takes place within processes o globalization because globalization involves

the calculative management and appropriation o time. It ollows that the

temporal orce o worlding is immanent to globalization and constitutes a real

power that resists and undermines it, thereby opening different temporalities

and worlds. o be immanent is to be part o the circuits o globalization,

to subtend them as an irreducible part o their structure and to exceed them

rom within by drawing on what constitutes them as an effective resource or

opening new worlds. Tere are no already-existing transcendent worlds rom

which to resist and counter capitalist globalization. But the sheer opening that

is the coming o time is always already there.Tere are at least three stages in the interplay between literary orm and

content that correspond to the relations between the two senses o worlding. I

schematically outline some protocols or reading postcolonial world literature

that enable us to track these stages. First, the novels undertake a cognitive

mapping o the situation in question to render a uller accounting o the issues

at stake. For example, they map the calculations o different types o global

capital and their unworlding o the world, the ruin and destruction they bring.

Te cases o unworlding the novels thematize include colonial slavery and itslegacy, humanitarian imperialism, manuactured amine, the displacement

o subaltern populations, and so on. As readers, we acilitate this mapping by

learning more empirical knowledge about the settings o the novels.

Second, the novels employ ormal means to revive non-Western temporal-

ities in the present that can aid in worlding the world otherwise. Put another

way, they generate alternative cartographies that enable a postcolonial people

or a collective group to oster relations o solidarity and build a shared world

in which sel-determination is achieved. Literatures worldly orce is here one

o constructive interpretation or critical mimesis that deploys various orms


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o realism, allegory, and symbolism. It contests (neo)colonial and capitalist

cartographies o the world with the normative aim o creating more progres-

sive mappings. Postcolonial world literature is here a transormative represen-

tation o the world in the narrow sense.

Tese cognitive mappings ofen involve an active intertextual rewriting o

canonical European literature. Te most obvious case is Cliff s reinscription o

motis and characters rom Te empest,Jane Eyre, and Great Expectations. On

the one hand, colonial education, insoar as canonical European literature had

an important unction in it, may have been the rst widespread institutional-

ization o world literature outside Euro-America. Hence, world literature in

the narrow sense o literature that circulates globally is historically complicit

with the epistemic violence o imperialism. On the other hand, Te Hungry

idecreatively transposes Rilkes Duino Elegiesto understand the Sundarbans

and reworld it or its subaltern inhabitants. In a similar vein, Gifsdraws on

Marcel Mausss amous essay on the gif to explore how Somalian olk prac-

tices o giving and storytelling constitute a worldly ethics.

Tird, in their different ways, the novels suggest that these heterotempo-

ralities are only sustainable by negotiating with the incalculable gif o time

as their abyssal ground. Because it subtends and disrupts the calculations

o global capitalist accumulation, the gif o time is the persistent opening o

other worlds. But at the same time, its sheer incalculability also underminesthe sovereign intention at work in the novels in their staging o new teleologi-

cal times. Tis incalculability is the sheer openness o worlding in the general

sense. It breaks open the eschato-teleological rame o the world in the derived

sense. Te intimation o the gif o time is registered at the level o narrative

orm by types o sel-reective narrative where intense preoccupation with

the novels narrativity suspends the telos o narrative ending. Here, literatures

worldly orce is no longer mimetic or constructive but an enactment o world-

ing by the gif o time.Te orce o world literature is ragile. But it nevertheless persists as a real im-

manent promise because without the openness o the world, nothing can take

place. Because literature intimates this orce o opening, it is diffi cult to speciy

what I have called world literature without the analysis o singular examples.

Te cases o postcolonial world literature discussed here are illustrative. Te

openness o world they enact is not cosmopolitanism as we commonly under-

stand the word, the community o human beings that stretches across the globe.

It is rather its ground. Te world in a normative sense reers to the being-with

o all peoples, groups, and individuals. It is the original openness that gives


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us accessibility to others so that we can be together. Global capitalism, how-

ever, incorporates peoples and populations into the world-system by tether-

ing them to Western modernitys unrelenting march o progress and capitalist

time and violently destroying other worlds and their temporalities. Attempts

to characterize contemporary literature as cosmopolitan on the basis o the

global character o literary production, circulation, and style only lead to a

acile cosmopolitanism devoid o normative orce. I am proposing a more

rigorous way o understanding world literatures normativity as a modality

o cosmopolitanism that responds to the need to remake the world as a place

that is opento the emergence o peoples that globalization deprives o world.

what is a world? by pheng cheah

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