Pheng Cheah Research Articles

Siting Postcoloniality: Critical Perspectives from the East Asian Sinosphere ed. by Pheng Cheah and Caroline S. Hau (review)

Siting Postcoloniality: Critical Perspectives from the East Asian Sinosphere ed. by Pheng Cheah and Caroline S. Hau (review)

Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance

Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance

World(s) apart – Borges Coelho’s Museu da Revolução and Writing in (and of) a Changing World

This article will depart from Said's position on the worldliness of texts and Pheng Cheah's reflections on postcolonial literature as world literature (2016) towards a reading of João Paulo Borges Coelho's 2021 novel Museu da Revolução. Borges Coelho's position on the articulation between history, politics, and literature (as literature; Rancière), as well as on the latter's aim of transforming the local place without losing sight of the universal, will provide insights into the ways in which the novel confronts the wordlessness of globalization. By staging a fictional democratization (Rancière), Museu da Revolução inscribes new ethico-political horizons as a "text that strives to generate the context", necessarily including those that have been forgotten from consensual (historical, political, memory) narratives. Lastly, the novel's positing of the transformative power of imagination will help flesh out the ways in which the "poetico-literary performativity" (Derrida) of texts can inscribe new ethico-political horizons and open up worlds (Cheah) when faced of the neoliberalist cancellation of the future (Berardi).

:World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture

:<i>World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture</i>

The Joy of the World

Abstract This article examines several recent theorizations of the concept “world” from within or in proximity to the field of world literature, and argues that these theorizations all suffer from a missed engagement with the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, the most important contemporary thinker of the concept. Focusing on recent books by Emily Apter, Debjani Ganguly, and Pheng Cheah, this article argues that while these theorists all make reference to Nancy, they do so in ways that miss essential aspects of his thinking. The article argues that the theoretical frameworks put forth by these thinkers prevent them from engaging with what Nancy called the “sense of the world.” The article concludes with a reflection on the place of joy in the text of Nancy to which all three of these thinkers make reference: The Creation of the World or Globalization.

Time After Time

This essay explores South African artist William Kentridge’s multimedia installation The Refusal of Time, first exhibited at documenta (13) in 2012. In the material surrounding this installation, Kentridge and Peter Galison interrogate the history of time’s material invention as a European system of imperial domination, one that gathered the planet itself into a homogeneous regime of sense. The installation explores the manifold workings of this systematised time in a dizzying array of arenas (colonialism, labour, industry, cinema, dance, quantum physics). Time emerges materially via rhythmic inter- and intra-actions mediated by power, but the installation also draws on a history of anticolonial revolt against time and formally de-naturalises time, releasing heterochronic energies and disrupting habituated experiences of time’s homogeneous neutrality. Via readings of Kentridge, Jacques Rancière, Pheng Cheah, and the contemporary politics of time, I approach a mode of heterochronic thought (encompassing theory, art, and politics) that insists upon time as potentialising force.

Worlds of Sound

Worlds of Sound

Worlding Asia Pacific into Oceania: Ecopoetic Transfigurations in the Anthropocene

Worlding Asia Pacific into Oceania:Ecopoetic Transfigurations in the Anthropocene Rob Sean Wilson (bio) The place-shattering practices, resource extractions, slow violence, oil wars, and migratory displacements across borders occurring under the reign of global capitalism go on distending the spatial and temporal sites, scales, and material resources of what we would have recognized (in the wake of poetic thinkers as diverse as Henry David Thoreau, Martin Heidegger, Hilda Doolittle, Kenzaburō Ōe, and Gaston Bachelard) as modes of dwelling-in-the-world. This telos of globalizing marketized values as norm ends up deforming the moral-cultural ethos of place and being which it takes for any such diverse practices to emerge and survive on what Waichee Dimock (2020) has described as a "weak planet" of declining democracies, runaway pandemics, unsustainable ecological systems, unstable weather, extreme events, zero-sum agonistics, authoritarian regimes, and rampant species extinctions. The approach posited in this essay would (against all such global odds) theorize, gesture toward, and activate an ethos and various tactics of resilient "worlding" and "reworlding" situated from coastal California across the transpacific space of Oceania to affiliated sites of survivance in Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, Honolulu, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Seattle, and elsewhere across the Anthropocene. This push toward "worlding Asia into Oceania" as such would imply not so much another Euro-derived theory universally applied as method for explaining the worlding of Asia and Oceania as it means instead to activate and elaborate diverse and situated practices of worlding in and across Asia and Oceania.1 This essay assumes, argues for, and will attempt to substantiate differences between the worlding of Asia (of here meaning tactics done to) versus a worlding in Asia (in here meaning tactics diversely enacted by peoples and values located in place, situated, and acting on the world). In shifting discursive contexts, Pacific Ocean cultural formations have long designated, at least since the 1980s if not postwar decades earlier, distinctive regions variously called "Asia Pacific" or "Asia/Pacific," as well as the more emergent framework of "inter-Asia," or denominated by the enduring environmental framework tied to tectonic plates and [End Page 65] climate currents called grandly the "Pacific Rim." Such re-formations of this vast oceanic region, geography, nation, peoples, and places are not all that disconnected from earlier Atlantic, Indian, Mediterranean, or Arctic oceanic frameworks and currents of transformation situated within the Anthropocene as shared planetary epoch.2 As will touched upon here and as I theorize more broadly in a forthcoming study called Pacific Beneath the Pavements, worlding should not be taken as another gesture, theme, or tactic reflecting world processes of late capitalism as the normative telos within the modernity and extreme weathers of the Anthropocene. Even a recent essay titled "Border Reading: Epistemic Reading and the Worlding of Postcolonialism" (Alaisal 2017) assumes that the meaning of worlding is all but synonymous with the global-capitalist dynamic of world literature as a hegemonic system centered in the metropolitan marketing and absorbing of the peripheries, even as the author argues that we should attend to the "border gnosis" of postcolonial sites like those in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, China, and Singapore to which his own studies of the literary humanities would remain affiliated. If the global is not the world as such, as Eric Hayot (2012), Pheng Cheah (2016), and Bruce Robbins (2017), among others, have delineated by advocating postcolonial and situated terms of difference, worlding should not be equated with these dynamics of neoliberal globalization as is commonly assumed as historical inevitability. Still, how can creative and research workers in literature, urban, ethnographic, oceanic, or cultural studies actualize these altered temporalities or posit modes of emergent or altered spatiality "in the era of globalization"—to invoke The Worlding Project (Connery and Wilson 2007) collection's subtitle—that had substantiated these emergent differences between "globalization" and "worlding" as horizon of historical possibility, world-making, life-world, values, and world-becoming? This large-scale unmaking of the life-world (what will here be called deworlding) under the often unjust, naturalized, rapacious, and disruptive spread of globalization is what creative philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy is getting at when he contends, in The Creation of the World...

Radical hopefulness in Mohsin Hamid’s map of the world: A reading of Exit West (2017)

ABSTRACT With a point of departure in Pheng Cheah’s idea of world as a temporal-normative category that encompasses universal humanity, this article discusses Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West as an urgent response to the need to rethink belonging in the current age of globalization and increased mobility across geographical spaces. This response draws on what Hamid calls “radical hopefulness” founded on empathy and solidarity embodied in the novel’s mapping of a world where migration and prayer are foregrounded as interconnective gestures that bring out shared humanity and hope for a world where “being with” supersedes notions of origin or national belonging. In the novel, migration and prayer pivot on connectivity and alternate ways of being in the world that, in Hamid’s response, function as radical, if not revolutionary, acts of worlding – in line with Cheah’s conception of the normative efficacy of world literature.

The Vanishing Point of World Literature

Abstract In the field of world literature, questions about the temporal versus spatial nature of worlding persist. One reason is the problematic nature of this dichotomy. Taking up Pheng Cheah’s calls for the temporal worlding of indeterminate becoming, my paper complicates the fate of spatiality in this move toward ontological open-endedness. With discussion of the vanishing point, I postulate that imaginative distancing in its relation to memory involves a spatialization that need not be circumscribed by global flattening of the humanist ethos central to the worldliness of world literature. In response to the connection Cheah draws between literature and worldliness, I claim that the latter is characterized by a spatiotemporal elasticity born from the proliferation of meaning in the former. At the extreme, this movement gestures toward the infinite held by the vanishing point, and there, indeterminacy appears absurdly paradoxical in our search for world value, as consciousness loses itself in the repeated and necessary attempt to transcend distance that cannot be measured.

Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution. Ian Duncan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xiii+290.

<i>Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution</i>. Ian Duncan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xiii+290.

Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America by Gorica Majstorovic

 Reviews Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America . By G M. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. . x+  pp. £. ISBN ––––. is highly innovative contribution to the field presents a timely re-evaluation of the Latin American modernist and avant-garde literature of the inter-war period through an anti-imperialist lens, drawing on a range of conceptual frameworks from both postcolonial and decolonial critical traditions. Building on the scholarship of Walter Mignolo, Beatriz Sarlo, Pheng Cheah, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Global Modernities examines the Latin American literary histories of the early twentieth century both as a nexus of decolonial thought and cultural production within the Global South and as a forerunner of the transnational South–South solidarities which would emerge during the s and s. Defining the Global South as both physical and geographical space, as well as ‘a discursive position from which theories of globalization are exposed and denounced’ (p. xiii), Gorica Majstorovic’s text maintains a focus which is firmly transnational. Considering avant-garde literary periodicals from across the continent , Mexican petrofiction, novels from Ecuador and Argentina, and travel writing from Nicaraguan and Dominican authors, this study sheds light on the multiple modernities at work in Latin America during this period. e corpus is impressive in its diversity of both geography and form, and successfully uncovers a network of connections between modernist cultural experimentation and emergent decolonial thought. e intermedial bent of the book is key here, as it facilitates a broader dialogue between the central literary texts of the corpus and other forms of contemporary mass culture, such as cinema, radio, and photography. Chapters  and  examine the output of a range of Latin American avant-garde magazines of the s, foregrounding the cultural and intellectual dialogue which these publications generated across the Global South as the engine of an alternative modernity which encompassed Andean indigenismo, the Harlem Renaissance, and the peripheral European modernism of the Balkans. Chapter  presents a new perspective on the novels Baldomera by Ecuadorian writer Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco and Los siete locos by the Argentine Roberto Arlt, using the aesthetics of Russian constructivist cinematic montage to elicit new meanings from both texts. Chapter  focuses on the mobility of Latin American modernities in the travel writing of, among others, Rubén Darío, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, and Ricardo Güiraldes. Finally , in Chapter  the author addresses the concept of cosmopolitanism in the Global South in the inter-war years through a study of Armando Discépolo’s  play Babilonia, foregrounding socio-economic factors such as mass immigration, precarity, and marginality to identify a dissident and radical ‘improbable cosmopolitanism ’ (p. ). Overall, Global Modernities convincingly advances a key thesis, namely that a more profound understanding of modernity generally, and in Latin America in particular, cannot be achieved without critical engagement with issues of empire, indigeneity, and decolonialization. By highlighting the threads of antiimperialism and transnational solidarity that run through the continent’s inter-war MLR, .,   literary production, this study destabilizes hegemonic anglophone subjectivities of the modern and posits the Global South as a key site in the articulation of a plural modernity in which aesthetics and the politics of social justice are inextricably intertwined. E B L Cortázar and Music. By N R. (Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures, ) Cambridge: Legenda. . xii+ pp. £. ISBN –– ––. Alongside literature and politics, music is an inescapable presence in the work of Julio Cortázar. In this thorough and wide-ranging study, Nicholas Roberts provides a detailed analysis of the myriad ways in which music appears in the novels, short stories, and critical work of the Argentine. In the process, he reveals that music was no mere leitmotiv, but rather provided the structural tools for key works. Cortázar loved music, wrote passionately about his preferences, and created memorable characters—Horacio Oliveira, the stuffy French critic Bruno, Johnny Carter—for whom music is more than just entertainment or pastime: it is the stuff of life itself. Roberts divides his subject’s musical interests into three broad genres: la música culta, or classical music; tango, Argentina’s (and Uruguay’s) beloved national sound; and jazz, from early New Orleans stylings through to...

World Enough, and Time: Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story with Marcuse, Benjamin, and Chakrabarty

This article contributes to recent discussions of temporality in relation to the concept of “world,” and especially, to how thinking “world” with “time” can rejuvenate postcolonial figurations of futurity. The theoretical texts I discuss include Pheng Cheah’s What Is a World?, Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection, and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. I retrieve the distinction in these works between the structural dislocations that “found” human being and decompose linear time, and more properly historical decenterings in which the heterotemporal is an effect of social processes of exploitation and (colonial-capitalist) domination. To honor this distinction, I place recent thinkers into dialogue with Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse, suggesting that a post-poststructuralist reclamation of the latter is particularly overdue. The article culminates in an explication of Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story—a work that asks us to live through its form that postcolonial mode of the nonsynchronous with which my argument is concerned.

Pheng Cheah, What is a World? On postcolonial Literature as World Literature, Durham, Duke University Press, 2016, 397 pages.

Pheng Cheah, What is a World? On postcolonial Literature as World Literature, Durham, Duke University Press, 2016, 397 pages.

World, Worlds, Worlding: A Review of Pheng Cheah's What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature

Review of Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Presents an overview of Cheah's argument regarding normativity and temporality in worlds and worlding, a summary of chapters, and an assessment of the book's contribution to philosophy, world literature, and postcolonial studies.

World Literature and the Italian Literary Canon: From Elena Ferrante to Natalia Ginzburg

Variously intended as a field of study, a paradigm, and/or a method of literary criticism, World Literature has in the last two decades become a central subject in literary studies. The current debate around World Literature is certainly central to the present and the future of the discipline of Comparative Literature. At the same time, as I show in this paper, a redefinition of World Literature, which would include a deeper understanding of both its risks and its potential benefits, can push us towards a revision of the canon(s) of our national literary traditions. Moving from Tim Park’s assertion that the popularity of Elena Ferrante’s “dull global novel” would contribute to obscuring more deserving authors – among whom he cites Natalia Ginzburg – this paper argues that Ferrante’s literary success could, on the contrary, pave the way for a rediscovery of past writers within the Italian literary tradition. Through a comparison of Ferrante’s L’Amica Geniale and Ginzburg’s La Strada che Va in Citta, the article shows how both works are, in Pheng Cheah’s terms, “literature that worlds and makes a world”, insofar as they foreground a world that is open and unstable, crucially caught between tradition and modernity, as well as the local and the global. Ultimately, both works call for a conception of World Literature that does not need to imply the loss of the local, but that can rather promote what Florian Mussgnug calls “responsible and responsive local sensitivity”.

Intersecting Imperialisms

Abstract Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), which features the Thai-Burma “Death Railway” in World War Two, depicts a complex web of imperial regimes that converge and clash in the mid-twentieth century. The protagonist is an Australian soldier effectively fighting for his country’s former colonizer, Britain, which is losing its empire to Japan. I build on Laura Doyle’s concept of “inter-imperiality” to explore how the novel illuminates the historical process of imperial factors intersecting at multiple levels, from the geopolitical and economic to the personal and cultural. The novel demonstrates how inter-imperial identities challenge simple binary models of imperialism, and how so-called national literatures are produced in a world context. This is evident in Flanagan’s intertextual homage to classical Japanese author Matsuo Bashō. The novel also highlights how world literature discourse ought to take into account temporal and ethicopolitical factors (Pheng Cheah), suggesting an overlap with postcolonial studies.

What Is a World (Literature)?

Abstract The following is an edited transcript of a presentation by Pheng Cheah on his book What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature, followed by a discussion with David Damrosch, with selections from the question and answer period. The event took place on the opening day of the July 2018 session of the Institute of World Literature, hosted by Professor Mitsuyoshi Numano and the Department of Contemporary Literary Studies at the University of Tokyo.

Why Mourning Matters: The Politics of Grief in Southeast Asian Narratives of Women’s Migration

This paper examines how migrant women’s lives are politicized through the work of mourning by analyzing how grieving over their deaths becomes a way of also claiming accountability from a nation-state that deploys its citizen-breadwinners. I employ critical discussions on mourning by Vicente Rafael, Pheng Cheah, and Judith Butler to analyze an OFW film and two Southeast Asian novels that present different responses to deaths of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers: Joel Lamangan’s The Flor Contemplacion Story (1995), Jose Dalisay’s Soledad’s Sister (2008), and Rida Fitria’s Sebongkah Tanah Retak (A Lump of Cracked Land, 2010). While these texts are different—one is a melodrama, the second a faux-detective novel, the last one a novel inspiratif (“inspirational novel”)—all three portray how grief becomes an affective economy, in that it reproduces and circulates feelings, like pity, sympathy, rage, and reproach, that forges a community to either foster or forestall political action. My reading maps out how the bereavement over migrant women’s lives can lead to a more critical understanding of labor migration policies and discourses in the Philippines and Indonesia, opening the possibilities of social activism that not only transforms a national community but also transcends national boundaries among and between Filipina and Indonesian migrant women.

Towards Eurasia: remapping Europe as ‘upstart peripheral to an ongoing operation’

ABSTRACTIn order to heed the call in world literature studies to work against disciplinary Eurocentrism by refiguring both what constitutes world literature and how this is read, in this article I propose world literature as an archive of world-making practices and as an impulse for the articulation of alternative methodological approaches. This takes world literature from the postcolonial South as, following Pheng Cheah, instantiating a modality of world literature in which the need for imagining worlds with alternative centres to those determined by coloniality is particularly acute. A response to this is facilitated and illustrated by a reading of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters from Russia (1930), and South African writer/activist Alex La Guma’s A Soviet Journey (1978). By drawing forward connections between the postcolonial South and the former Soviet Union, this complicates traditional colonial arrangements of the colonial ‘centre’ as cradle of civilisation and culture, as well as postcolonial scholarship’s cumulative fetishisation of ‘Europe’, by allowing a reshuffling of the co-ordinates determining ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ and a more nuanced grasp of ‘Europe’ simultaneously. These imaginative journeys destabilise ‘Europe’ as closed category and call forth Eurasia as a more appropriate categorical–cartographical framework for thinking this space and the connections and (hi)story-telling it stages and fosters.