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Cheah, Pheng-2016-Missed Encounters-Cosmopolitanism, World Literature, and Postcoloniality PDF
Cheah, Pheng-2016-Missed Encounters-Cosmopolitanism, World Literature, and Postcoloniality PDF
Missed Encounters
Cosmopolitanism, World Literature, and Postcoloniality
In a recent video installation, The Refusal of Time, the South African artist Wil-
liam Kentridge brilliantly captures a key premise of this book: the hierarchical
ordering and control of the world as we know it is based on technologies of
temporal calculation. Kentridge shows how the cartographical organization
of the capitalist world-system relies on Northern-and Eurocentric regimes
of temporal measurement. The subordination of all regions of the globe to
Greenwich Mean Time as the point zero for the synchronization of clocks is a
synecdoche for European colonial domination of the rest of the world because
it enables a mapping that places Europe at the world’s center. This tethering to
the uniform march of European standard time is a form of imprisonment that
smothers lived local temporalities (see this book’s frontispiece).
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The third part of the book introduces a third term to the encounter between
cosmopolitanism and world literature: postcoloniality. Literature of the post-
colonial South is an important modality of world literature defined as litera-
ture that worlds and makes a world because the sharp inequalities created
by capitalist globalization and their devastating consequences for the masses
of postcolonial societies make the opening of other worlds a matter of the
greatest imperativity. Put another way, the tension between cosmopolitanism
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