Worlding World Literature

Emily Sibley (bio)
New York University

A review of Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Duke University Press, 2016.

The basic premises of Pheng Cheah’s book are encapsulated in its title: first, that any consideration of world literature requires a return to theorizing “world” beyond its spatial dimensions, and second, that postcolonial literature bears a unique relationship to world literature in its ability to challenge hegemonic understandings of what that world is. As a field, World Literature is often criticized for being apolitical—for performing a disingenuous depoliticization rooted in the logic of equivalency, where one text from the Global South is easily substituted for another, and for turning a blind eye to the structures of power that postcolonial theory brings to critical attention. Where inequalities are acknowledged, it is often done with a center-periphery model of a world system in mind, applying an evolutionary logic that has at its core a notion of Eurocentric teleological progress. Cheah is certainly no stranger to these debates, and his contribution critically considers the positionality of world literature vis-à-vis histories of imperialism, global capital, and modes of cosmopolitan belonging.

Cheah’s stated aim is to rethink “world” as a temporal category, and, in the process, to reorient critical thought toward the relationship of literature to the world—a question wholly different from the ways in which literature circulates within that world. He rightly notes that the focus on circulation takes the world as a pre-defined entity, which is precisely what What is a World? questions. Only by first examining the category of “world” can we consider its relationship to literature. Cheah’s position rests on the injunction to think beyond spatial cartographies, instead turning to time as the crucial category by which to define the world. “Before the world can appear as an object, it must first be,” he writes, arguing that philosophical paradigms based on temporality provide important bases for resistance to the globalizing thrust of capitalism (2). He devotes the first two parts of the three-part book to examining the category of “world” in this temporal sense, providing rigorous readings of European philosophies of world. Part Three explores how several postcolonial novels elucidate the openings and closings of worlds beyond the time of global capital.

Cheah thus positions his work as a corrective to the dominant spatial turn in world literature theory. His first chapter critiques the way cartographical models reproduce the capitalist system of thought and valuation. He takes aim, for instance, at Pascale Casanova’s much-debated theory that literature acquires value through recognition by the metropole. In Casanova’s spatial model, circulation is what matters; literature remains reactive in its relation to the world rather than possessing any force of its own. For Cheah, by contrast, literature’s normative force lies in its power to create ethical response and engagement with the world. Ultimately, this is what he aims to theorize: an “ethicopolitically committed world literature” in contrast to one that is market-driven (34).

How can we constitute an ethical ground for literary representation in a secular, postmodern era? The pursuit of an answer to this question takes Cheah through a number of philosophers grouped into three main categories: the spiritualists (Goethe, Hegel), the materialists (Marx, Lefebvre), and the phenomenologists/deconstructionists (Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida). The return to Goethe is inescapable, given his foundational status as the author of the term Weltliteratur. Cheah’s reading highlights three aspects of Goethe’s thought: the connection to cosmopolitanism as universalist intellectual practice; the “sacralization of world literature”; and the conception of world as “an ongoing dynamic process of becoming” (40–41, 42). Hegel brings histories of violence and domination to bear upon the concept of world as spiritual process, where “historical violence is absolved by a theodicy of spirit’s teleological progress towards the actualization of freedom in the world” (55). For Cheah, the conceptualization of world as a “dynamic spiritual whole” and as an objective (rather than idealist) structure constituted by violence are valuable contributions to a theory of “world,” which he decouples from a Eurocentric teleology that legitimizes violence (57). While Marx, Hegel’s materialist inverter, stands as the progenitor of cartographies of capital, Cheah retrieves from his writing a concept of world as “rational-purposive human relationality” that emphasizes a “vital motility in embodied place” and mobilizes people towards self-determination (65, 73). In Marx, the world is defined in terms of social relations. Capital shapes the human subject as that subject becomes part of the production cycle; it creates a “cultivated cosmopolitan human being” as part of its eradication of national barriers (71). For Cheah, the temporal dimension of Marxist theory is found in the circulation of capital. Capital seeks to eradicate time: both time and space must be reduced, even obliterated, for potential value to become actual value. As capital accelerates, it becomes its own barrier, one that will lead to the eventual Aufhebung of the capitalist world. The process of self-actualization set in motion by capital transforms alienated social relations, as the emergent universal proletarian subject reappropriates the production process, and with it time itself.

Cheah’s argument for a philosophy of world rooted in temporality draws heavily on Heidegger, who, like Marx, rejects the idea of world as a spatial container, instead focusing on relationality in concepts such as care, being-thrown, and being-with. For Heidegger, world “worlds”: the active property of “world” inscribes it with a temporal component that makes it a “‘force’ of opening or entry” (96). In contrast to other philosophies that regard the material world as something to be transcended, Heidegger posits a radical finitude that makes “temporality…the movement of transcendence itself” (110). His disavowal of teleological time makes the world necessarily contingent and fragile, a condition of possibility for our openness to nature and the objects around us. Cheah finds that for Heidegger, spatial models obscure the relationality that grants meaningfulness and “deprive us of our proper worldliness” (103). Acts of unworlding stem from the failure “to recognize the structural openness to the outside that is proper to our being” (120). Heidegger criticizes the processes of anthropocentrism and objectification that take over in the age of globalization, seeing it as the flattening of the world to a single plane of representation. The erasure of authentic relations is a loss of world and an abdication of responsibility and care towards others. Such loss is a condition of modernity that exceeds postcolonial realities, though Cheah suggests that the postcolonial text registers this condition most acutely due to global capitalism’s capacity to destroy or fundamentally change the cultures of the Global South.

Derrida elaborates Heideggerian philosophy “by suggesting that time is not proper to human Dasein but comes from the absolutely or nonhuman other” (161). For Derrida, alterity constitutes and maintains the experience of presence, which Cheah reads as both a temporal and an ontological category. Alterity, despite its inability to be appropriated or defined, calls forth an ethical response that elicits the transformation of the world; according to Derrida, writes Cheah, “the normative force of worldly ethical and political action originates in a response to absolute alterity” (170). Alterity opens us up to possible futures, including the future of reason itself; without an openness to alterity that demands decisions, ethics, and action, reason stagnates and dies. Derrida calls this structural openness to the unknown future the “gift of time” found in the openness to alterity (171). In his turn to Heidegger’s philosophy and its Derridean expansion, Cheah shows that conceptualizing the world according to temporality—and in particular, according to the world’s radical finitude and its yet to come (l’à-venir, for Derrida)—is necessary in order to fully access relations to other beings, human and nonhuman, which in turn gives rise to obligation, ethical action, and normative force.

The pursuit of a normative theory of world literature drives Cheah’s work, which relies on the relation of the concepts of teleological time and of worlding to ethics and to the creation of a better world. He argues that in spite of their differences, these concepts illuminate the world as a “dynamic process with a normative practical dimension” that contributes to the rethinking of world literature as that which opens up a particular kind of world (192). According to Cheah,

“Normativity” refers to what ought to be. We conventionally understand norms and their related cognates, values, as ideals that practical reason prescriptively projects onto reality to transform it in the image of human ends or as principles immanent to collective human existence that will unfold and actualize themselves. The force of a norm comes from its universal validity. (6)

With this focus on normativity, Cheah assumes an unapologetically universalist stance. Goethe’s model of a universalizing world literature suddenly seems not so very far off—but neither is the question of who sets the norm and recognizes it as such. Universalist humanism has been beleaguered by this problem due to its complicity with colonialism and, more recently, the politics of global development and human rights. To his credit, Cheah tackles the tensions between universalist ethics of the norm and local modes of being-in-the-world through his readings of postcolonial literature, including works by Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, Ninotchka Rosca, and Timothy Mo. Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Farah’s Gifts are particularly good examples of the ways in which a globally conceived and administered humanist ethos can conflict with local needs. Ghosh’s novel describes in detail how the international project of creating a wildlife preserve for tigers in the Sundarbans, the mangrove forests of West Bengal, was carried out by the Indian government with exceptional violence against local villagers. It shows how modernization, seen in the forest preserve laws and commercial prawn industry, makes subaltern lives in the Sundarbans increasingly precarious. Farah’s novel shows that international food aid during the Somali famine of the 1990s represented Somali subjects as victims deprived of choice in receiving charitable gifts, whereas local modes of communal support and giving were fashioned on mutual obligation and upheld human dignity. In Cheah’s description, “the ethics of international philanthropy, the novel suggests, is continuous with the capitalist world-system’s exploitative logic of commodity exchange” (279). He suggests that such revelations of violence demand not only an affective response from the reader, but also actions that recognize and preserve other cultures and their modes of being-in-the-world.

Cheah uses the term “normative” to make an ethical appeal. But is normativity the right term? This is not a semantic argument, but rather a question of what and who constitutes the norm. Behind this call for literature to bear normative force is an implicit requirement for those in positions of authority to adjudicate and act as a corrective to the market’s measurements of value. Cheah’s own remarks point to this requirement and the moral force it presumes, particularly in his introductory comments explaining his choice of novels. He alleges that complaints from a graduate seminar reveal a Eurocentric bias that divorces aesthetics and theory from politics, where postcolonial texts are primarily read for political and anthropological information (15–16). Against charges that the novels are uninteresting or simply not very good, he offers this defense: “These 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 examples of world literature” (15). The only explicit measure of valuation Cheah mentions is circulation in international prize circles, but Cheah fails to extend the same scrutiny to these bodies as he does to other international bodies operating according to a similar ethos, such as charitable or environmental organizations. In his reading of Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, he offers two examples of “a universalistic humanist cosmopolitanism” for critique: the first a translator representing a bourgeois multilingualism that thrives on multinational traffic; the second an international researcher whose funding comes from the North (261). It remains unclear how prize bodies differ from the cosmopolitanism Cheah critiques, yet the Nobel committee appears to determine normative value. Moreover, it is striking that all of Cheah’s selected novels were published in English. Aside from a few brief discussions of translation —“vulgar,” in Heidegger’s conception of world (104); “ambivalent,” for Ghosh (274); language as indicative of “hybrid creativity” and “cosmopolitanism from below” in Mo (328) —Cheah remains curiously silent on questions of language despite its imbrication in imperialism. Aamir Mufti’s recently published Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures warns against this blind spot, tracing the invisible imperialism of English as the normative language of world literature. Cheah’s work remains ensconced within two canonical frames—European philosophy and English-language postcolonial texts—which raises questions about how the concept of normativity functions throughout What is a World?

Recently, several Western scholars have turned to philosophical and literary traditions outside of Europe in order to put the categories of “world” and “literature” under pressure. In Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, Emily Apter argues that the way “world” translates in various languages demonstrates these languages’ different conceptual underpinnings. In In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt, Michael Allan demonstrates that in some Arab circles, “literature” figures both as the textual object and as the process of becoming canonical linked to modernization. These works, geared toward a categorical rethinking of “the world” outside the Western canon, become crucial if world literature is to respond to the challenges of its Eurocentric and Orientalizing provenance, which, as Mufti uncompromisingly argues, “continue to structure the practices of world literature” (19). Theory must travel, including theories of world. This methodological challenge plays out in the course of What is a World. The only philosophical decentering occurs in the opening chapter of Part Three, “Postcolonial Openings,” where Cheah takes up theories of heterotemporality devised by Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe and Néstor García Canclini in Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. While Cheah’s portrayal of the normative force of world literature undoubtedly stakes a claim to the importance of the humanities, as academics we must remember our own complicity in circles of power that influence our choices of what we judge worthy of inclusion and how we structure our critical engagements.

It remains unclear why Cheah holds on to the term cosmopolitanism when numerous moments in his book serve to critique the concept, both in theory and in reading how it plays out in the worlds of the postcolonial novel. The introduction demonstrates his determination to rescue a cosmopolitan ethics grounded in humanist idealism: “Cosmopolitanism is about viewing oneself as part of a world, a circle of political belonging that transcends the limited ties of kinship and country to embrace the whole of deterritorialized humanity” (3). Cosmopolitanism remains unsituated, however, as its “optic is not one of perceptual experience” but of imagined belonging (3). In turning to postcolonial novels, that imagining reveals itself as a disconnected idealism that reads as profoundly ambivalent, if not negative. “There is nothing inherently liberating about mobility,” Cheah observes in his chapter on Cliff, discussing her presentation of Jamaican emigration from the colony to the metropole (218). This “cosmopolitanism” is not one of ethical idealism, but one of diaspora, migration, and other patterns of transnational communication and economics. Cheah’s discussion of Ghosh reveals the “transfiguration of cosmopolitan middle-class consciousness by subaltern stories,” and Mo’s novels present a “worldliness from below” (259, 325). Worldliness is irreducible to cosmopolitanism, as Cheah suggests in his reading of Heidegger, because it recognizes and activates the already present relationality of beings in connection (104). Cheah returns again and again to the concept of worldliness in his postcolonial readings, and thus it seems more fitting to abandon the term cosmopolitanism altogether in favor of worldliness, especially given his presentation of that term as more theoretically sound. Worldliness helps to solve the problem that cosmopolitanism becomes bound up in law, as Cheah elucidates in a discussion of the concept’s origins: “Cosmopolitanism worlds the world in the image of humanity and posits the world as a universal fraternal community of human beings. It is identical with humanization.… Cosmopolitan concepts and institutions are thus part of a project of human self-making” (176). These institutions, authorized with the force of law, create a form of normativity at odds with the normativity that Cheah outlines in his turn to the postcolonial: a form of obligation that is other to the laws of global human institutions.

Nonetheless, the redefinition of world literature in What is a World? is a valuable, timely contribution to the field. As Cheah asserts, his work “leads to a radical rethinking of world literature as literature that is an active power in the making of worlds, that is, both a site of processes of worlding and an agent that participates and intervenes in these processes” (2). He ultimately derives four criteria for world literature: 1) it must take the existing world created by globalization as its theme and “cognitively map” how a society is situated within the larger system; 2) it must reconsider nationalism and cosmopolitanism as intertwined instead of in opposition; 3) it must imagine the world as one of dynamic processes, stripped of any form of teleology; and 4) it must carry a principle of transformation and “performatively enact a world,” indicating the possibility of “a ‘perhaps’ or ‘otherwise’ that sets temporalization in motion” (211–12). Cheah’s desire to retain the concept of cosmopolitanism, as seen in his second point, seems rooted in his insistence on the possibility of universal ethics. World literature as redefined discloses and imparts this ethics, and that ethical appeal is of the utmost importance. The questions raised by the framework of normativity—who and what constitute the norm—must be endlessly reexamined, but this does not make ethics impossible—or, rather, it takes the form of Derridean impossibility, the possible impossible, which continues to imagine the world differently and acts as an imperative to bring that world into being through encounters such as those made possible by world literature.

Works Cited

• Allan, Michael. In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt. Princeton UP, 2016.
• Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On The Politics of Untranslatability. Verso, 2013.
• Mufti, Aamir. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Harvard UP, 2016.