Postcolonial world literature: Narration, translation, imagination

Abstract

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.

On islands of truth in the Anthropocene: Kant, Rousseau and the loss of worlds

“…Thus, the scientific image cannot claim a permanent title to truth that is always mired in incompletable recursions born of the contingencies of truth encounters. But this calling-into-question-of-truth, drawing from recent literary theory, does not, by any means, intend to celebrate the supremacy of unrestrained relativism, but rather to hold on ‘to the praxis of semantic and conceptual equivalences’, but not without ‘the constant caveat of the necessary falling short of these equivalences’ (Wiemann et al, 2021: 9), thus pointing to the refutability of any truth claim. In this context, the power of the false exacerbates the tension of the anxious Anthropocene as a conceptual equivalence of a no-world future – a conscious misrepresentation of the object it seeks to represent, that is to say, the future in the past (the Holocene).…”

Gender Discourse – Representation of Ideas about the Distribution of Gender Roles

“…The author believes that world literature is in conflict between the Imperial imposition of a hierarchically stratified world and an unrealised "undivided world". It is the tension between these "two worlds" that shows uniqueness and specific kinship, which replenishes, and at the same time, hinders the development of modern world literature (Wiemann et al, 2021).…”