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Divisions of Labor
Between Cheah’s Worlds
ragini tharoor srinivasan
A review of Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World
Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Cited in the text as ww.
To be a scholar of literature these days it seems you must have a take
on, if not a stake in, world literature. Pheng Cheah’s What Is a World?
On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature is the latest entrant into
what is arguably the most contested debate on the study, configuration, and theory of literature today. The much-anticipated monograph presents a project first announced in a 2008 essay in Dædalus:
the development of a normative theory of world literature as literature that opens up an “ethicopolitical horizon . . . for the existing
world” (ww, 5) as well as “other possible worlds, thereby giving us
resolve to respond to modernity’s worldlessness and to remake the
world according to newly disclosed possibilities” (ww, 129).1 What Is a
World? unfolds in three parts, which respectively examine European
philosophical conceptualizations of the world and philosophies of
worlding (parts 1 and 2), and literature from the postcolonial South
(part 3).2 As with Cheah’s earlier work, it is a magisterial study, written in his characteristically scrupulous and teacherly prose.
There is much to learn from What Is a World? at the levels of its intervention into the field of world literature, its case for postcolonial
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literature as an exemplary modality of world literature, and Cheah’s
own interpretive style as a reader and critic. And yet, the book’s substantive arguments risk being overshadowed by a passage in its introduction that has already, at time of writing, gained some notoriety.3
In that passage, Cheah describes having taught a graduate seminar
in the spring of 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley, that
roughly charted the outline of the book.4 According to Cheah, the
course, which was cross-listed in rhetoric (Cheah’s home department)
and English, yielded unexpected resistance: “The comments in course
evaluations by graduate students in English were worrying” (ww, 15).
These students described the novels Cheah taught as “wanting” and,
in one case, “terrible.”5 They reportedly questioned the syllabus for
its inclusion of novels on the basis of their having “thematized issues
about ‘world’”; as a result, students alleged, the discussion “focused
too much on thematic issues” (ww, 15). Cheah’s judgment of these
evaluations is definitive: “My students’ comments are patently Eurocentric. They favor European philosophy and dismiss literature about
the non-Western world by writers of non-Western origins” (ww, 15).
Full disclosure: I was in that class, although, as a graduate student
in rhetoric at that time, not in English, I am not one of those cited.6 Leaving aside the incongruity of a senior scholar commenting
in print on anonymous graduate student evaluations, Cheah’s professed “worry” about his students has left discernible traces throughout What Is a World? It has even, I will suggest in what follows, modulated the progression of the book’s argument. “Eurocentrism” is no
minor charge. Here, it points to a series of theoretical-pedagogical
conflicts between the worlds that Cheah variously inhabits as scholar
and teacher, and into which we readers might follow him in turn:
philosophy and area studies, rhetoric and English, postcolonial literature and world literature.
The twentieth century saw numerous efforts to reanimate Goethe’s
project of Weltliteratur, from the philological criticism of Erich Auerbach in the 1950s to A. Owen Aldridge’s efforts in the 1980s to bring
“universal standards” to the comparative study of literature as scholars grappled with the increasingly urgent imperatives of reading literatures of the non-West.7 Recent re-specifications and critiques of
world literature include Emily Apter’s case for untranslatability, Pas-
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cale Casanova’s world-systems-theory-inspired “literary geopolitics,”
the generalist-specialist negotiation of translated literatures advocated by David Damrosch, Wai Chee Dimock’s counter-Andersonian
“literature for the planet,” Eric Hayot’s enumeration of aspects of the
“aesthetic world-imagination,” Peter Hitchcock’s study of transnational chronotopes in the “long space” of postcolonial novels, Franco
Moretti’s pragmatist prescription of “distant reading,” Aamir Mufti’s
argument that world literature has its provenance in the philological
tradition of Orientalism, Francesca Orsini’s “significant geographies”
approach emphasizing multilingualism and local perspectives, R.
Radhakrishnan’s contention that world literature results from metropolitan desires for self- deprovincialization, Nirvana Tanoukhi’s efforts to rethink “the scale” of the world literary imagination, Rebecca Walkowitz’s identification of works that are “born translated” and
thus world literature from inception—and the list goes on.8
In the view of some critics, world literature suffers from the problems of categorical opacity (is it a descriptor of past and present literary exchange, or an aspirational horizon?), delusional ambition (all
the literatures of the world?), and the global linguistic hegemony of
English, which is the primary translational medium for world literary works taught in the North Atlantic academy. By that same token,
proponents argue that world literature is the only adequate, ethical
response to literary study under the conditions of neoliberal globalization. Cheah does not exactly survey this critical terrain (of those
listed above, he discusses only Casanova, Damrosch, and Moretti—a
politics of citation to which I will return). Nevertheless, he argues
that current debates on world literature have both undertheorized
the world and missed the significant force of temporalization as a
process that “constitutes the openness of a world” and serves as a
“normative resource for disrupting and resisting the calculations of
globalization” (ww, 9).9
What Is a World? addresses roughly three implications of this
blind spot. First, there is the problem that Cheah gives titular pride
of place. What is a world, and how should it be productively distinguished from companion terms like “globe,” “planet,” “nation,” “the
transnational,” and “the international”? Cheah argues that the world
is equivalent neither to the globe—a spatial, political, and economic
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construct discursively constituted by the capital flows now identified
with globalization—nor to the planet—a term with ecocritical resonances and an attendant call for ethical stewardship of the Earth,
made familiar by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. According to Cheah,
recent theorists of world literature have been so “mesmerized” (ww,
65) by the metaphor of the global market that they have consistently conflated the world (a temporal process of becoming) with the
globe (a spatio-geographical terrain). In so doing, they have reduced
literature to a superstructural expression (“an epiphenomenon of a
material base” [ww, 31]) of existent world-systems and global spatial
relations. For example, while Goethe is conventionally credited with
inaugurating the project of world literature, Cheah shows that Weltliteratur is not at all assimilable to world literature in its current dispensation, namely, as a mode of organizing literature that renders
inutile national borders. For Goethe, Cheah emphasizes, the dynamic
engagement or “intercourse” between nations was intended to keep
national literatures “refreshed by the interest[s] and contribution[s]
of [foreign ones].”10 Moreover, Goethe specified the world as a form
of “being-with” that is not equivalent to the globe, but rather is “an
ongoing, dynamic process of becoming, something continually made
and remade” (“wiw,” 30–31).
Cheah’s third chapter, on Marxist theory and the “materialist inversion of spiritualist models of the world,” further develops the argument that the critique of capitalism requires a “temporal account
of the world” (ww, 61) as distinct from the spatial entity of globe.
Cheah at first seems to lay the blame for the world-globe conflation
at Marx’s door: “Marx’s argument that the world market is the material basis of world literature is directly responsible for the confusion
of global trading circuits with the world in theories of world literature” (ww, 63). It swiftly becomes clear, however, that the problem is
not Marx, but recent readers’ failures to grasp Marx’s vitalistic emphasis on temporal “dynamism”: “[C]apital’s world-making force is
grounded in the human power to appropriate time” (ww, 72). Cheah
then turns to Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey for critical theories
of space that give priority, where Marx does not, to art, literature, and
“aesthetic practices [that play a] role in creating social space” (ww, 89).
The second problem Cheah addresses is that of defining “litera-
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ture” and identifying methodological approaches adequate to its normative force. The question for Cheah is not what mode of literary
study will be able to grapple with the quantitatively vast, qualitatively
varied, linguistically disparate bodies of literature in and of the world
(a predominant question in recent studies of world literature), but
rather how we are “to analyze world literature as the interplay of different processes of worlding” (ww, 14). Damrosch’s much-trafficked
definition of world literature as comprising “all literary works that
circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in
their original language” (wwl, 4), together with Moretti’s insistence
that “distance . . . is a condition of knowledge” (“cw,” 57), has inspired
the “computational criticism” of digital humanists at Stanford’s Literary Lab and the Chicago Text Lab, among other venues for the transdisciplinary, collaborative study of global literary networks through
“network analysis, natural language processing, and other socialscientific tools with traditional humanistic methods.”11
In contradistinction, What Is a World? offers a model of empirically
grounded close reading that attends both to the novelistic staging
of heterotemporalities and to social-scientific research on colonial
violence and neocolonial globalization. For example, chapter 9, on
Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, includes lengthy discussion of environmentalism, ecotourism, and the protection of the tiger in India’s
Sundarbans, where the novel is set. Chapter 10 places Nuruddin Farah’s Gifts in the context of social anthropologist Alex de Waal’s work
on humanitarian internationalism. The discussion of “social forces”
is ultimately secondary, however, to that of literature’s own “force of
signification” (ww, 36), as Cheah locates in literature qua literature
the capacity to “[uncover] the world and [open] up other possible
worlds, thereby giving us resolve to respond to modernity’s worldlessness and to remake the world according to newly disclosed possibilities” (ww, 129).
Finally, What Is a World? takes on a much- debated rubric for the
study of history, literature, and global relations: the postcolonial.
New theories of world literature give two primary accounts of the
relationship between “postcolonial” and “world” paradigms. The first
posits world literature as a renomination of the postcolonial; the second holds up the postcolonial text as the world literary exemplar.
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The first is a relation of succession: non-Western texts from the postcolonial peripheries of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system have
emerged from “the waiting room of history” into a space-time coeval
with that of Euro-America and promoted to the vaunted status of
“world.”12 The second is a relation of incorporation, exemplified by a
2010 collaboration between the Annenberg Foundation and wgbh/
pbs (with the consulting efforts of Damrosch) that listed Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things as one of the “great works of world
literature” alongside The Odyssey, the Bhagavad Gita, and The Epic of
Gilgamesh.13 Where previously world literature courses taught texts
written in non- dominant, vernacular languages of the world translated into English, now world literature courses, anthologies, and programs like the pbs series feature novels like Roy’s (and Ghosh’s and
Farah’s) that are written in English but from or about underdeveloped or developing parts of the world.
For the most part, Cheah takes the second approach. Yet What Is
a World? says curiously little about the problem of English as the
language of capital, a problem that currently dominates discussions
about global modernisms, translation and comparison, and the place
(indeed, the fate) of the postcolonial in world literature. Aamir Mufti’s Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature, also published in
2016, thus provides an instructive complement to Cheah’s approach.
Mufti argues that “[h]idden inside world literature is the dominance
of globalized English” (fe, 13); therefore, “[a]ny critical account of literary relations on a world scale—that is, any account of world literature as such—[must] actively confront and attend to [the] functioning of English as vanishing mediator” (fe, 16). This mediating function
began not in the recent era of postcolonial globalization, Mufti stresses, but rather with the Orientalist philology of the colonial period.
Whereas Cheah asks what the world in world literature is, Mufti—
attending closely to literatures in English, Hindi, and Urdu—seeks to
specify where in the world it comes from.14
In light of companion texts like Mufti’s, it is striking that Cheah’s
case for a normative conception of world literature hinges on his
readings of European philosophies of world. As with his at once
faithful and revisionist account of Goethe (he retains the Goethean
conception of world while rejecting the Eurocentric underpinnings
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of Goethe’s conception of the “foreign”), what Cheah conserves from
Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Arendt, and Derrida is as instructive as what
he critiques. From Hegel’s philosophy of world history, Cheah conserves the conception of the world as “both the subject and object
of judging” (ww, 53), “constituted by relations of violence” (ww, 57),
but not Hegel’s teleological conception of time. From Marx he takes
the insight that “global capitalism’s power to make a world is temporal” (ww, 69), but not Marx’s “reduction of the world to the space
of market exchange” (ww, 62). Through Heidegger, Cheah develops a
conception of worldliness as “the constitutive ontological structure
of our existence . . . our original openness to other beings, our transportability toward other beings, or their accessibility to us” (ww, 98),
but he seeks, as did Arendt, to understand “forms of authentic worldly action” that such an account might foreclose (ww, 136).
Of course, these readings, which make up roughly half the book,
involve much more than what I am schematically describing as a
kind of hermeneutic give-and-take.15 In “a process of dialectical incorporation and rejection,”16 Cheah slowly erects the edifice of his
theory on the scaffolding of European philosophy. He arrives at his
temporal conception of world and the normative force of world literature through veritable oeuvres (the select bibliography lists eighteen
texts by Arendt, thirty- one by Derrida, and twenty by Heidegger),
not through discrete arguments in canonical texts.17 Reading from
German idealism to deconstruction, Cheah develops an account of
temporalization that takes into consideration both its relationship
to eschato-teleological frameworks of time and phenomenological
accounts of worlding. For instance, the significance Arendt imparts
to storytelling as “a source of meaningfulness that illuminates human
existence”18 helps in the elaboration of what Cheah terms “the ‘literary’ structure of the world” (ww, 136), but Cheah rejects her reduction
of temporalization to the miracle of natality, which he calls a “a utopian principle of salvation” (ww, 155). Then, with recourse to Derridean
deconstruction, Cheah forwards a radical conception of temporality
as coming from “the absolutely . . . other” (ww, 161), “the inappropriable nonhuman other” (ww, 173).19
Here’s part of what is distinct about Cheah’s approach: Unlike
scholars who assume a knowing audience, Cheah does not lead with
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a critique of a given text. Rather, he leads with a rigorously faithful
reading and then delineates what the text in question (now adequately “read”) enables and forecloses for the discussion at hand. His interpretive style suggests, in other words, not only that Hegel or Heidegger has been misread by those he terms “nonspecialist” readers (ww,
47), but that they have never really been read at all.20 Thus, while Cheah
is not the first to argue in a Heideggerian vein that what “world” announces is “the gesture of worlding, the world- desire” (olw, 40), he
omits from discussion Hayot’s 2012 book On Literary Worlds, which
similarly seeks to specify how literature might not just be of the
world, or a reflection of its social forces, but rather itself a force in the
creation of worlds that are “social and conceptual constructs, as well
as formal and affective ones” (olw, 44–45).
My point is not that Cheah needs Hayot to make his argument (he
doesn’t).21 My point, using Hayot as just one example, is that, for an
intervention into the field of world literature, What Is a World? is at
times strikingly aloof from the critical world it inhabits.22 As I noted
above, Cheah does not discuss the related work of Apter, Hitchcock,
Orsini, or Walkowitz, to name only a few theorists of the new world
literature. This non-acknowledgment is in part a familiar academic
practice of territory- clearing, but it is also a product of the book’s
plan. Parts 1 and 2 of What Is a World? extend back to the eighteenth
century and involve close readings of German and French philosophical texts, while part 3 limits its focus to English-language literary fiction written on or from the postcolonial South in the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries. It is an “international” division of labor (in both space and time) that leaves little room for contemporary
literary- critical discourse, on the one hand, and lays bare the dominance of global anglophonism as a sociocultural, linguistic, and literary complex, on the other. As I will discuss later on, Cheah himself
is acutely conscious of this division; nevertheless, it is the enabling
condition of his text.
Together with the epilogue, the chapters of part 3 offer case studies of novels by Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, Ninotchka Rosca, and Timothy Mo rooted in and routed through (to
borrow James Clifford’s homonymic distinction) Jamaica, India, Somalia, and the Philippines. Cheah states at the outset that these are
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national contexts in which “the opening of other worlds [is] a matter
of the greatest imperativity” (ww, 11). The novels themselves depict the
lived time of other life-worlds and make reference to divine forces, an
attempt compatible with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s and Néstor Garcia
Canclini’s postcolonial theories of heterotemporality. Cheah seeks to
complicate these well-known accounts (also known as theories of alternative modernities), which he argues are reliant on an understanding of plural temporalities “within the order of presence” (ww, 208).
He critiques what he reads in postcolonial theories of heterotemporality as “nostalgia for a pure past” (ww, 204), advocating instead that
“[w]e must patiently search for extant resources for reworlding the
world” (ww, 12, my emphasis). Here, Cheah downplays what I take
to be the crux of Chakrabarty’s argument in Provincializing Europe,
namely, that the past is extant, that “humans from any other period
and region [are] always in some sense our contemporaries,” and that
the present,” too, is “noncontemporaneous with itself.”23
Postcolonial theory is not in any case Cheah’s chief focus. He is interested in novels that specifically “see[k] to have a worldly causality
in contemporary globalization” (ww, 13); he terms these texts “activist literature” (ww, 211). The activism in question is directed against
the problem of worldlessness, the condition of those whom postcolonial globalization has (Cheah uses Heidegger’s category) “deprived
of world” (ww, 178). But this account raises several questions that are
not fully addressed: If worldliness is “a capability of my being,” something that I must “grasp,” though I might fail in various ways and for
various reasons to do so (this is Cheah’s reading of Heidegger), then
how (I would ask of Cheah) can this original capability be lost (ww,
100)? Does a failure to grasp this capability constitute a blind spot or
actual loss, world-ignorance or worldlessness? Cheah argues that “[w]
e regain the world when we grasp it as the force of making-possible
that enables possibility and actuality”; at the same time, he asserts
that literature is that which discloses this “force of making-possible”
(ww, 126). The key seems to be the reader’s ability to recognize—as
oppose to recover— extant possibilities in the self and the world, yet
What Is a World? never fully theorizes the gap between the literary text
and the agential capacity of the grasping reader.
Perhaps, if I may proffer a hunch, this is because Cheah’s “we” im-
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plies a normative reading position that his actual readers can only
strive to approximate. By that same token, the omission results from a
fundamental aspect of the argument for temporalization as the motor
of literary worlding, which proceeds from a demonstrated isomorphism of “world” and “literature.” For Cheah, these two terms share an
uncertain, indeterminable, ambivalent, “curious” (ww, 10) ontology:
Literature is intimately related to the opening of another world by
virtue of its peculiar ontological status. As something that is structurally detached from its putative source and that permits and even
solicits an infinite number of hypotheses about its meaning even
when there may not be one, literature exemplifies the undecidability that opens a world. (ww, 180)
The questions of the ontological status of literature and its relationship to time are not in themselves new. We might think of Paul
Ricoeur’s work in the early 1980s on the narrative unfolding of temporal worlds and later revisions by Dorrit Cohn.24 Cheah does not
address these long-standing debates in narrative theory, nor is he interested in counterarguments that literature may not be an ontological category at all, but instead a functional one.25 His approach is
to demonstrate through close readings of primary texts the force of
literature’s undecidabilty—its ability, in other words, to flout even
authorial design. To return to my question about the reader’s agency,
if literature’s normative force is dependent on the radical indeterminacy of its effects, it is no wonder that What Is a World? renders the
reader’s capacity to grasp this worlding force as undecidable as well.
For instance, Cheah reads Cliff ’s Clare Savage Novels (Abeng and
No Telephone to Heaven) about the afterlives of colonialism in Jamaica
against the grain of authorial intention. He takes seriously Cliff ’s stated aim, expressed in an essay on the status of the Caribbean writer,
that Clare Savage’s tragic death at the end of No Telephone to Heaven
performs “a reunification with precolonial temporalities from which
one can project a future that will be free of the colonial past and the
neocolonial present” (ww, 242). However, argues Cheah in his reading of the death scene (a poetic scene involving extended blank space
between words, unconventional line breaks, and sounds like “coo, cu,
cu, coo”), it equally suggests “the snuffing out of heterotemporality,”
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perhaps even “the death of revolutionary consciousness” (ww, 244).
He then—and this is the critical move—reads this reading against
itself (“And yet . . .”).
To put a finer point on it, for Cheah, literary undecidability refers
not just to plurality of meaning or the question of a literary text’s in/
completeness, but also to literature’s fundamental openness to the
other, to being read by the other, and to meaning otherwise. Each
chapter in part 3 offers a similar mode of analysis. Ghosh intends for
The Hungry Tide to dramatize “a solution whereby its middle- class
protagonists become radically transformed and are moved to responsible action by their contact with subaltern cultural practices and religious rituals,” but Cheah finds in the novel “a more fundamental
force of worlding that cannot be appropriated into a divine figure”
(ww, 248). Farah’s Gifts “self-reflexively foregrounds the worlding power of stories by suggesting that we emerge as self- determining agents
and engage in reciprocal relations with others by telling stories” (ww,
296). However, Cheah counters this suggestion: “because stories arise
in response to the incalculable gift of a world, their worlding power also radically undermines sovereign self- determination” (ww, 301).
Each novel’s worlding attempt is complicated by its “open- ended
character” and “inability to achieve a conclusive end” (ww, 313), an
inability that is intrinsic to its potentiality, if not unique to the postcolonial text.
Part 3 also drives home the critiques of Arendtian natality (the
“miracle of natality”) and Arendt’s emphasis on deliberative action.
For Cheah, “real hope” (ww, 159) resides in finite temporality, not
divinity. It resides in an original openness to being together, not togetherness produced through rationally willed “communication or
discursive exchange,” as if “Dasein [were] a subject that reaches out
to another subject through language in order to form a world” (ww,
104). This definition also undergirds the provocative distinction What
Is a World? develops between cosmopolitanism and worldliness, two
terms that, according to Cheah, the new theories of world literature
have tended to conflate: “Gradually expanding intersubjective relations so that the geographical boundaries of human community
are extended transnationally does not create a world but instead obscures it by reducing worldliness to spatial extension” (ww, 123). That
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the blurb on the back of What Is a World? bills it as “the first critical
consideration of world literature’s cosmopolitan vocation” reinforces
Cheah’s argument for how vital, and still underappreciated, this distinction really is.
Why Cheah reads the texts he reads is, of course, as important as
how he reads them, that is, in what order and to what effect, and at
various points in the book he pauses to defend his object choices.
He anticipates the criticism I offered earlier that the organization of
What Is a World? suggests “a division of labor between European philosophy and literature from the postcolonial South, where postcolonial literary texts have the subordinate function of illustrating the . . .
problems . . . that European philosophy elaborates” (ww, 14). “In fact,”
he counters, “no such division exists”:
This is a work of literary theory where I study philosophical conceptions of world that are insufficiently theorized or simply missing in
existing theories of world literature in order to construct a normative theory of world literature. My analyses of postcolonial world
literature are not merely examples of this theory. They inflect and
deepen the theory by exploring concrete postcolonial sites where
the opening of new worlds is of the greatest urgency. (ww, 14)
It is, as is all of Cheah’s prose, a clear, incisive account of the role that
postcolonial literature plays in the development of literary theory.
However, as is often the case with preemptive defenses, the effect is
one of protesting too much. There is, as the structure of “parts” indicates, a division between the European philosophy and the postcolonial literature examined in What Is a World? Moreover, this division is
Cheah’s veritable calling card.
Cheah’s first monograph, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom
from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (2003), was divided
into two parts: part 1 offered readings of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and
Marx; part 2 read postcolonial texts by Pramoedya Ananta Toer and
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. He wrote then,
The problems of postcoloniality are an exemplary performance
and undoing of the fundamental concepts of organismic vitalism.
Just as it is impossible to understand postcoloniality without some
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grasp of the philosophemes of freedom, culture, and organic life, it
is also impossible to understand the future of these ideas without
a consideration of their displacement outside the North Atlantic.26
Cheah’s second book, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and
Human Rights (2006), used a normative theory of culture to critique
new cosmopolitanisms (à la Homi Bhabha and James Clifford) and
human rights discourses. It began with this disclaimer:
[T]his book draws some of its material and examples from the
postcolonial world and so falls within that niche of academic publishing called “postcolonial studies.” But I have used this material
to illuminate broader and, I hope, fundamental theoretical issues
concerning the nature of humanity. In doing so, I have not respected the academic division of labor between area studies and the
disciplines. I offer no modest apologies for this. Europeanists universalize European milieus and experiences all the time. Instead of
provincializing Europe, I have attempted a necessarily provisional
universalizing of one corner of postcolonial Asia. (ic, 13)
Readers familiar with Cheah’s work will know that the division of
labor between postcolonial studies and scholarship in disciplines like
philosophy and English has substantively informed his critique of
the international distribution of labor under global capital. Cheah
himself suggests that the methodological “part”-itioning of content
in his books entails a critique of the academic divisions.
But consider again the language of the above disclaimers. Cheah
uses postcolonial examples to “inflect and deepen” a normative theory of world literature; he uses them in service of “broader and . . .
fundamental theoretical issues” of humanity—as if the postcolonial
were a tool, not an archive; as if the postcolonial were not sufficiently
broad, nor fundamental. These are not just semantic points. Cheah
has argued before that the problem with area studies is that the nonWest is only ever known “through the more developed structures of
self- consciousness of the West.”27 Against this historical condition, he
proposes that practitioners of area studies (including scholars of the
postcolonial) “claim that their subject is a part of the universal . . .
something that actively shares in and partakes of the universal in a
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specific way” (“ua,” 62). In other words, if the universal is that which
is capable of overcoming finitude, conditionality, and contingency—
of transcending and abstracting from the particular—then the postcolonial subject must claim its particularity in order to then work
through its bounds and stake a claim to the universal. In advocating
self- consciousness of limits, Cheah offers a theory of peripherality
that appears to preserve the subordinate condition as the condition
of possible emergence.
In What Is a World?, Cheah doubles down on his method of “universalizing” the postcolonial. He also, to return to my opening discussion, gives it the surprisingly personal impetus of his English department graduate students’ “Eurocentric” evaluations of his world
literature course. To my mind, Cheah’s elevation of a classroom tussle
into an ideological confrontation exposes two problems that have
implications for What Is a World? The first is the critical potential and
significance of theme. Read generously, the graduate students’ comments suggest that Cheah may not have offered, in his 2010 seminar,
a convincing argument for plot as form and for theme as activist intervention. The very fact that What Is a World? explicitly promises to
show how the “formal aspects” of its chosen novels “present solutions
to their thematic concerns” (ww, 16) is a sign that the problem identified in class would become central to the book’s argument.
Second, the admission of this pedagogical scene of evaluation anticipates the problem of readership that I have been discussing: the
problem of ideal readers and unfit readers, reluctant readers, and
readers in the know. Cheah takes issue with the fact that recent theories of world literature give no agency to the reader: “Both the literary
text and the reader are simply dummies through which social forces
are ventriloquized” (ww, 36). Although What Is a World? does not explicitly present a theory of reading practices—it is not a how-to guide
for the reading of world literature—it attempts to advance, against
the ventriloquizing accounts, a definition of postcolonial world literature as a form of critical resistance that “brings the attention of the
wider world to the plight of people impacted by global forces and
their struggles to safeguard a future for their worlds” (ww, 17). Postcolonial world literature, Cheah writes, “map[s] the calculations of different types of global capital and their unworlding of the world,” and
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“[a]s readers, we facilitate this mapping by learning more empirical
knowledge about the settings of the novels” (ww, 17).
Yet the participation of the reader in postcolonial world literature’s
normative vocation remains an undertheorized part of the argument.
Who or what constitutes “the wider world” of readers to whose attention the postcolonial plight must be directed? Does postcolonial
world literature lose its normative force if the reader does not facilitate or participate in this cognitive mapping? What tools beyond the
text do readers require in order to participate in said mapping (and
is it all “cognitive”)? When is postcolonial literature not a modality
of world literature? Such questions bump up once more against the
problem of global English and its readers: Is a text an example of
world literature if it’s written in English but read only in the postcolonial South? Is it world literature if it’s written in English but about
the postcolony? Is there a way in which Cheah’s normative theory of
world literature understands the anglophone postcolonial novel as a
novel in translation?
These questions are not intended to be perverse. In my recent
readings in the field I have been persuaded that, as a concept, world
literature “contains within itself an attempt (or at least the desire) to
bridge the social distance between the First and Third Worlds, between the centers of the world system and its peripheries” (fe, 20).
Taken together, Cheah’s monographs represent a long-standing critical project of bridging such distances and opening worlds, of translating literature for its others and exposing readers to other literatures.
For some postcolonialists, one “name for the logic of this bridging
is ‘Orientalism’” (fe, 20). What are we to make of the fact that there
is no entry for “Orientalism” in the index of What Is a World?, while
there is a lengthy one for the “Eurocentrism” Cheah detects in his
students’ comments?
It seems to me that “Eurocentrism” is, in the final instance, a displacing diagnosis, and one that returns us to the question of method.
At various points in What Is a World?, Cheah broaches the subject of
translation: how fundamental it is to the project of world literature;
how both critics and novelists must ward against “a simplistic ethical
view of translation as the perfect conveyance of meaning that brings
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about a transparency between minds and cultures” (ww, 272). Cheah
knows that there is an enduring form- content debate in postcolonial literary studies undergirding the evaluations of his students.28
His own work persuasively demonstrates that “[a]lterity is also the
nonerasable possibility of the contamination of the world it opens
up” (ww, 277). It is ironic, then, that a problem of translation, a kind
of pedagogical misfire, the contaminating resistance of the studentreader, takes us to the limit of the text.
ragini tharoor srinivasan completed a PhD in rhetoric at the
University of California, Berkeley, in 2016. She is currently assistant
professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Acknowledgments
I want to express my gratitude to the editorial board of Qui Parle, especially Basit Iqbal and Emily O’Rourke, as well as to Roanne Kantor
for feedback on an earlier version of this essay.
Notes
1. See also Pheng Cheah, “What Is a World? On World Literature as WorldMaking Activity,” Daedalus 137, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 26–38. Hereafter
cited as “wiw.”
2. “Postcolonial South” is Cheah’s phrase, an amalgamation of “postcolonial” and “global South” that serves to designate postcolonial societies “outside the European world-system” that are characterized by “the
sharp inequalities created by capitalist globalization” (ww, 11–12).
3. By way of “proof” I offer the anecdotal evidence that I was alerted to
this passage by multiple colleagues within weeks of the book’s publication in early 2016.
4. Although Cheah writes that the seminar was taught “in the spring of
2009” (ww, 15), I attended the class and know that it was taught during
the spring semester of the 2009–10 academic year.
5. It is perhaps worth noting how Cheah himself describes Nuruddin Farah’s Gifts, one of the novels criticized by his graduate students: “The
novel’s often heavy-handed critique takes the form of didactic commentary” (ww, 288).
6. Cheah explains in a footnote that “[a]lthough the students are not iden-
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7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
tified by name in the evaluations, they are asked to identify their department and major field” (ww, 334n20).
See Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur (1952),” trans. Marie
and Edward Said, Centennial Review 13, no. 1 (1969): 1–17; and A. Owen
Aldridge’s The Reemergence of World Literature: A Study of Asia and the
West (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1986).
Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability
(New York: Verso, 2013); Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters,
trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) 36;
David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), hereafter cited as wwl; Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” pmla 116, no. 1, Special Topic: Globalizing Literary
Studies (Jan. 2001): 173–88; Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 40, hereafter cited as olw; Peter Hitchcock,
The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68, hereafter cited as “cw”; Franco
Moretti, “More Conjectures,” New Left Review 20 (2003): 73–81; Aamir
Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2016), hereafter cited as fe; Francesca Orsini,
“The Multilingual Local in World Literature,” Comparative Literature 67,
no. 4 (2015): 345–74; R. Radhakrishnan, “World Literature: by Any Other
Name?” pmla (forthcoming); Nirvana Tanoukhi, “The Scale of World
Literature,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2008): 599–617; Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
For a related social scientific account of globalization’s control and
management of time, see Sarah Sharma, In the Meantime: Temporality
and Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe “Some Passages Pertaining to the Concept of World Literature,” in Comparative Literature: The Early Years, ed.
Hans J. Schulz and Philip H. Rhein (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1973), 8.
The Chicago Text Lab: Computational Methods for the Study of Culture, https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/literarynetworks, and Stanford
Literary Lab, https://litlab.stanford.edu.
Sangeeta Ray, “Imagining Otherwise: South Asian Literatures and the
mla,” Comparative Literature Studies 50, no. 2 (2013): 236–43.
See “Invitation to World Literature,” Annenberg Foundation (2013),
http://www.learner.org/courses/worldlit.
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14. Chapter 1 of Forget English! is titled “Where in the World Is World
Literature?”
15. With respect to the division of labor between parts of What Is a World?,
parts 1–2, which follow the introductory chapter, comprise 164 pages;
part 3 extends for 118 pages, followed by an epilogue.
16. This is Emily O’Rourke’s apt phrasing.
17. By contrast, of Damrosch’s many writings on the subject of world literature, the bibliography lists only What Is World Literature?, which is now
over a decade old.
18. Pheng Cheah, “World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception
of World Literature,” New Literary History 45, no. 3 (2014): 325.
19. This argument further develops the project of Inhuman Conditions, in
which Cheah showed that “radical susceptibility to the outside . . . constitutes all finite beings.” Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2006), 132. Hereafter cited as ic.
20. “Nonspecialist reader” is Cheah’s term for a reader who is “distracted”
away from Hegel’s normative conception of world by Hegel’s “gross
political incorrectness” (ww, 47).
21. In contradistinction to Cheah, Hayot’s interest is in enumerating a
range of technical mechanisms of “world-production” in literature,
such as amplitude, completeness, and metadiegetic structure.
22. Beyond the field of world literature, there are other contemporary
works of literary theory that What Is a World? might also have productively engaged. For example, Cheah’s discussion in chapter 10 of “the
world [as] nothing but an auto-poetic process of narration about itself”
(ww, 296) dovetails interestingly with Mark Seltzer’s elaboration of “a
world that consists in itself plus its registration.” See Seltzer, “The Official World,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 4 (2011): 728; and Seltzer, The Official
World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
23. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 109–12.
24. Ricoeur argues that “[t]he world unfolded by every narrative work is always a temporal world . . . time becomes human time to the extent that
it is organized after the manner of a narrative” (3). Paul Ricoeur, Time
and Narrative: Volume I, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). See also Dorrit Cohn, The
Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
25. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell,
1983); Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Lit-
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erary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1992).
26. Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press,
2003), 12.
27. Pheng Cheah, “Universal Areas: Asian Studies in a World in Motion,” in
The Postcolonial and the Global, ed. Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C.
Hawley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 61. Hereafter cited as “ua.”
28. The postcolonial novel has been charged with being both too political and, in light of the linguistic play of canonical figures like Salman
Rushdie, not political enough. See Deepika Bahri, Native Intelligence:
Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2003); Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998); Eli Park Sorenson, Postcolonial Studies
and the Literary: Theory, Interpretation and the Novel (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010).
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