On (Re)Theorising Postcolonial Literature in the Era of Globalisation: The "World" as an Area of Contention

Renewed interest in Goethean "world literature" (Weltliteratur) on the eve of the third millennium has called forth enthusiastic responses from certain literary commentators, yet it has conversely been met with mixed and hostile reception in other critical circles. More precisely, not only has the blanket spatial framing evoked by the term "world" prompted scepticism among postcolonial researchers, but objections have also been raised among the same category of scholars about the largely apolitical substratum from which 21st-century "world literature" developed in the Euro-American academy (e.g. Graham, Niblett and Deckard 2012; Boehmer 2014). As a reaction to the now established field of world literary studies, some postcolonial scholars appear to have set out to re-interpret the core notion of "world" by exceeding its literal limits. The "world", under their pens, has steadily become a "world" (see Cheah 2016), that is, not an all-embracing entity but one that is historically, socially, economically, and – more importantly in this case – politically circumscribed. "World", to put it another way, has here gone through a process of re-semanticisation whose prime aim seems to consist in embedding the postcolonial ethos in the meaning of this five-letter word. In this paper, I will use methods inspired by the discipline of stylistics to examine a corpus of influential texts about today’s Weltliteratur produced by world and postcolonial literary theorists. In so doing, I will attempt to show how the latter group of scholars have skilfully got their piece of the "world literature" pie, thereby giving a fresh impetus to their cause in the first two decades of the 2000s.