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Postcolonial world literature
- 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 inPostcolonial 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.…
Author details: | Dirk WiemannORCiDGND, Ira Raja, Mazumdar Shaswati |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513621994707 |
ISSN: | 0725-5136 |
Title of parent work (English): | Thesis eleven : critical theory and historical sociology |
Subtitle (English): | Narration, translation, imagination |
Publisher: | Sage |
Place of publishing: | London [u.a.] |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2021/02/16 |
Publication year: | 2021 |
Release date: | 2023/04/21 |
Tag: | Emily Apter; Postkoloniale Theorie; Weltliteratur; oneworldness; relationality; singularity; untranslatability |
Volume: | 162 |
Issue: | 1 |
Article number: | 0725513621994707 |
First page: | 3 |
Last Page: | 17 |
Funding institution: | DAADDeutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD)European Commission |
Funding institution: | UGCUniversity Grants Commission, India |
Funding institution: | Taylor and Francis |
Funding institution: | University of Potsdam |
Funding institution: | University of Delhi |
Funding institution: | Thesis Eleven |
Organizational units: | Philosophische Fakultät / Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik |
DDC classification: | 8 Literatur / 80 Literatur, Rhetorik, Literaturwissenschaft / 800 Literatur und Rhetorik |
License (German): | Keine öffentliche Lizenz: Unter Urheberrechtsschutz |