Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature

Abstract

The definition of “world literature” has been subject to many discussions since the late 20th century (see Cecile Girardin’s review in this issue); with this book, Pheng Cheah adds a cogent contribution to it. He starts by asking the question “what is a world” when one talks of “world literature,” challenging our spatial view of the world, as divided into time zones, when originally it was conceived as a temporal category. Conceptualizing the world in temporal terms, Cheah then undertakes to ...