What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature by Pheng Cheah (review)

In the still-burgeoning field of writings that seek to (re)define and (re)direct our readings of world literature, Pheng Cheah has contributed an eloquent volume that stands out in the crowd and belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the field. What Is a World? aims at nothing less than a redirection of our current expansive and largely materialist approach to world literature, epithets that could characterize everything from David Damrosch's emphasis on circulation through Pascale Casanova's struggle for prestige in the republic of letters, to Franco Moretti's model of "form as force." While Johann Wolfgang von Goethe remains a touchstone in discussions of world literature, his largely hermeneutical and ethical formulations of Weltliteratur have limited impact on the current discourse—nor could they, really, given that they are scattered and at times contradict one another. Instead, Karl Marx's association of world literature with capitalism's relentless breaking down of cultural singularities to create a single global market has become the dominant model of cultural exchange, confronting practitioners of world literature with the question of whether we are opening a world of difference, or are instead complicit in the propagation of a standardized and exclusionary literary discourse composed either in a globalized English or "for translation." In the author's own words, "By interpreting circulation as spatial mobility, theories of world literature miss the point that . . . circulation is 'normative' because its dynamism is temporal. [I will] show how postcolonial world literature reinscribes Marx's emphasis on vital motility in embodied place into an injunction to make a vital world in which a people can emerge as self-determining" (73). Postcolonial narratives—yes, only narratives and presumably the right kind of narratives—are capable of opening worlds with the gift of time. Let us see how this works by unpacking Cheah's thesis.

It is developed in three stages (the introduction [1–19] being a rehearsal of the book's overall argument). The author first lays out of the development of thinking about world literature in German philosophy. Despite his use of commercial metaphors and his eurocentrism, Goethe emerges as a hero due to his emphasis on the normative dimension of world literature as a process of becoming. G. F. W. Hegel, on the other hand, while preserving the spiritual and temporal dimensions of world literature in his lectures on aesthetics (which were quite influential on later German attempts to write world literary history), replaced hermeneutical discovery with the conflict of ideas that led, as we well know, to an unfortunate hierarchization of civilizational accomplishments that became part and parcel of the imperial and colonial ventures of Europe. Marx has been discussed earlier, and his brief remarks on world literature are supplemented in this book by a discussion of Marxist theorists Georg Lukács and Henri Lefebvre.

Enter Martin Heidegger, whose thought (supplemented by that of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida) dominates the second part of the book, titled "Worlding and Unworlding." Along lines similar to those taken by Djelal Kadir in the pages of this journal ("To World, To Globalize— Comparative Literature's Crossroads," vol. 41, no. 1 [2004]: 1–9), Cheah explains why Weltliteratur should really be understood as weltende Literatur, that is, literature that worlds. There are of course many competing interpretations of what Heidegger meant with Weltlichung and its antonym, Entweltlichung, and Heidegger's invention of a unique vocabulary for his philosophy makes summary of his ideas difficult, but we can begin with the premise that Heidegger was working against our everyday perception of the world as a space filled up with things. World is instead the "total context of meaningful connections in which we exist with others" (97). If science and philosophy have worked to reduce the world to subjects and objects, literature remains one of the discursive modalities for uncovering the reality that objectivist filters hide. Then, if we take the liberty of extending...