In What Is a World? Pheng Cheah draws on accounts of the world as a temporal process from Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Arendt, and Derrida, and analyzes several postcolonial novels to articulate a normative theory of world literature's capacity to open up new possibilities for remaking the 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 Select Bibliography  369 Index  383

"Drawing from four critical philosophies–idealism, Marxist materialism, phenomenology, and deconstruction–theorist Pheng Cheah invites the reader to reconsider the presuppositions that underpin contemporary theories about world literature. Works from luminaries Amitav Ghosh, Michelle Cliff, and Timothy Mo, among others, providethe reader with concrete examples of Cheah’s theories in action."

"Setting out to provide a systematic and analytical account of the notion of the world—and worlding—Pheng Cheah rethinks world literature not as the inevitable outcome of globalization, or as a reaction to the world system, but as part of the capitalist conceptual reconfiguration of the world. Powerful and provocative, What is a World? makes a significant, timely, and radical intervention."