Cheah, P: What Is a World?

Acknowledgments  vii

Introduction. Missed Encounters: Cosmopolitanism, World Literature, and Postcoloniality  1

Part I. The World of World in Literature in Question

1. The New World Literature: Literary Studies Discovers Globalization  23

2. The World According to Hegel: Culture and Power in World History  46

3. The World as Market: The Materialist Inversion of Spiritualist Models of the World 60

Part II. Worlding and Unworlding: Worldliness, Narrative, and "Literature" in Phenomenology and Deconstruction

4. Worlding: The Phenomenological Concept of Worldliness and the Loss of World in Modernity  95

5. The In-Between World: Anthropologizing the Force of Worlding  131

6. The Arriving World: The Inhuman Otherness of Time as Real Messianic Hope  161

Part III. Of Other Worlds to Come

7. Postcolonial Openings: How Postcolonial Literature Becomes World Literature  191

8. Projecting a Future World from the Memory of Precolonial Time  216

9. World Heritage Preservation and the Expropriation of Subaltern Worlds  246

10. Resisting Humanitarianization  278

Epilogue. Without Conclusion: Stories without End(s)  310

Notes  333

Bibliography  369

Index

Pheng Cheah is Professor of Rhetoric and Chair of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights and Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation.