TY  - JOUR
A1  - Wiemann, Dirk
A1  - Raja, Ira
A1  - Shaswati, Mazumdar
T1  - Postcolonial world literature
BT  - Narration, translation, imagination
JF  - Thesis eleven : critical theory and historical sociology
N2  - Postcolonial criticism has repeatedly debunked the ostensible neutrality of the ‘world’ of world literature by pointing out that and how the contemporary world – whether conceived in terms of cosmopolitan conviviality or neoliberal globalization – cannot be understood without recourse to the worldly event of Europe’s colonial expansion. While we deem this critical perspective indispensable, we simultaneously maintain that to reduce ‘the world’ to the world-making impact of capital, colonialism, and patriarchy paints an overly deterministic picture that runs the risk of unwittingly reproducing precisely that dominant ‘oneworldness’ that it aims to critique. Moreover, the mere potentiality of alternative modes of world-making tends to disappear in such a perspective so that the only remaining option to think beyond oneworldness resides in the singularity claim. This insistence on singularity, however, leaves the relatedness of the single units massively underdetermined or denies it altogether. By contrast, we locate world literature in the conflicted space between the imperial imposition of a hierarchically stratified world (to which, as hegemonic forces tell us, ‘there is no alternative’) and the unrealized ‘undivided world’ that multiple minor cosmopolitan projects yet have to win. It is precisely the tension between these ‘two worlds’ that brings into view the crucial centrality not of the nodes in their alleged singularity but their specific relatedness to each other, that both impedes and energizes world literature today and renders it ineluctably postcolonial.
KW  - Postkoloniale Theorie
KW  - Weltliteratur
KW  - Emily Apter
KW  - oneworldness
KW  - relationality
KW  - singularity
KW  - untranslatability
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513621994707
SN  - 0725-5136
VL  - 162
IS  - 1
SP  - 3
EP  - 17
PB  - Sage
CY  - London [u.a.]
ER  -