Pheng Cheah

The Creolization of Theory

Introducing this collection of essays, Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih argue that looking back—investigating the historical, intellectual, and political entanglements of contemporary academic disciplines—offers a way for scholars in the humanities to move critical debates forward. They describe how disciplines or methodologies that seem distinct today emerged from overlapping intellectual and political currents in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the era of decolonization, the U.S. civil rights movement, and antiwar activism. While both American ethnic studies programs and “French theory” originated in decolonial impulses, over time, French theory became depoliticized in the American academy. Meanwhile, ethnic studies, and later also postcolonial studies, developed politically and historically grounded critiques of inequality. Suggesting that the abstract universalisms of Euro-American theory may ultimately be the source of its demise, Lionnet and Shih advocate the creolization of theory: the development of a reciprocal, relational, and intersectional critical approach attentive to the legacies of colonialism. This use of creolization as a theoretical and analytical rubric is placed in critical context by Dominique Chance, who provides a genealogy of the concept of creolization. In their essays, leading figures in their fields explore the intellectual, disciplinary, and ethical implications of the creolized theory elaborated by Lionnet and Shih. Edouard Glisssant links the extremes of globalization to those of colonialism and imperialism in an interview appearing for the first time in English in this volume. The Creolization of Theory is a bold intervention in debates about the role of theory in the humanities. Contributors . Etienne Balibar, Dominique Chance, Pheng Cheah, Leo Ching, Liz Constable, Anne Donadey, Fatima El-Tayeb, Julin Everett, Edouard Glissant, Barnor Hesse, Ping-hui Liao, Francoise Lionnet, Walter Mignolo, Andrea Schwieger Hiepko, Shu-mei Shih

What is a world? On world literature as world-making activity

Dædalus Summer 2008 Modern cosmopolitanism is largely an affair of philosophy and the social sciences. Whether one thinks of the ideal ethical projects of worldwide solidarity of the eighteenth-century French philosophes or Kant, or of more recently emerging discourses of new cosmopolitanism in our era of economic globalization, transnational migration, and global communications, literature seems to have little pertinence to the construction of normative cosmopolitan principles for the regulation of institutional actors on the global stage, or to the study of the proliferating associations and networks that envelop the entire globe. Cosmopolitanism is primarily about viewing oneself as part of a world, a circle of belonging that transcends the limited ties of kinship and country to embrace the whole of humanity. However, since one cannot see the universe, the world, or humanity, the cosmopolitan optic is not one of perceptual experience but of the imagination. World literature is an important aspect of cosmopolitanism because it is a type of world-making activity that enables us to imagine a world. At 1⁄2rst glance, cosmopolitanist discourse seems only to refer to literature in disparagement. Kant frets that his teleological account of world history, with its goal of establishing a world federation of states, will be taken for a fanciful 1⁄2ction: “It is admittedly a strange and at 1⁄2rst sight absurd proposition to write a history according to an idea of how world events must develop if they are to conform to certain rational ends; it would seem that only a novel could result from such a perspective [Absicht].”1 However, he also points out that cosmopolitanism is a pluralism, the imagining Pheng Cheah

World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature

Recent theories of world literature (Casanova, Damrosch and Moretti) have obscured its normative dimension because they have only understood the world in terms of spatial circulation, the paradigmatic case of which is global capitalist market exchange. This essay offers a critical analysis of the limitations of the recent revival of world literature. It outlines an alternative temporal understanding of the world as the normative basis for a radical rethinking of what “world literature” signifies and develops a normative account of world literature as an active power of world-making that contests the world made by capitalist globalization.

Crises of Money

In their 2000 academic blockbuster, Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri made the polemical argument that postcolonial theory leads to a dead end because it remains obsessed with the modern form of domination associated with colonialism that is no longer the primary mode of power operating in contemporary globalization.1 There is some truth to this claim, regardless of the relative merits and weaknesses of their own account of the postmodern sovereignty they call “empire.” The origins of postcolonial theory and cultural critique in the discipline of literary studies has meant that their analyses of oppression, domination, and exploitation have taken as their fundamental paradigm the experience of nineteenth-century European territorial imperialism and colonialism. Hence, if we consider the critique of Orientalist discourse or representational systems (Edward Said), the racist stereotypes of colonial discourse, or even the epistemic violence

The Material World of Comparison

If comparison is a fundamental activity of human consciousness, then what is its stimulus internal to consciousness or the human spirit or something that comes from the external or objective world? This essay traces the genealogy of the idea that comparison is an activity that forms consciousness in some canonical texts of modern philosophy (Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel) and the elaboration of this idea into a stimulus for the awakening of anticolonial consciousness in radical postcolonial nationalist literature (Jose Rizal, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and Michelle Cliff). It then argues that in contemporary globalization, comparison is no longer a critical activity but a material infrastructure that undermines the formation of a shared world even as it makes us more connected in unprecedented ways.

THE WORLD IS WATCHING

The concept of mediation is crucial to the structure of cosmopolitanism understood as a perspective whereby one sees oneself as a member of a world. This article examines the mediatic structure of cosmopolitanism by discussing two different philosophical models of this structure in Kants and Hegels philosophies of world history. It then considers what happens to this structure in contemporary global political economy by looking at a series of news events concerning the Peoples Republic of China in 2008 (the riots in Tibet, the Sichuan earthquake and the various events surrounding the Beijing Olympics). It concludes with some thoughts on the virtualization of power and the role of business journalism, as illustrated by the assessment of US sovereign credit by ratings agencies in 2011.

Human Freedom and the Technic of Nature: Culture and Organic Life in Kant's Third Critique

In recent years, the impact of exponential technological innovation and globalization on all spheres of human life has led to the urgent questioning of the limits of the human and even to predictions about its imminent demise within the horizon of virtual reality and cyborg worlds where the boundaries of human bodies themselves seem to dissolve as they undergo limitless prosthetic extension. But the question of the end of man, or the posthuman, is not a new one. It is a grand old anthropologistic theme. As Jacques Derrida pointed out in 1968 (with special reference to Foucault’s prediction of the disappearance of man at the conclusion of The Order of Things), the end of man in the sense of the exceeding of the limits of the anthropos always involves a transcendence of human finitude that points toward a higher end in the sense of an infinite telos.