Suchergebnisse

Through an examination of debates about cosmopolitanism and human rights, Inhuman Conditions questions key ideas about what it means to be human. Cheah links influential arguments about the new cosmopolitanism to a perceptive examination of the older cosmopolitanism of Kant and Marx, and juxtaposes them with proliferating formations of collective culture to reveal the flaws in claims about the imminent decline of the nation-state and the obsolescence of popular nationalism

The new world literature : literary studies discovers globalization -- The world according to Hegel : culture and power in world history -- The world as market : the materialist inversion of spiritualist models of the world -- Worlding : the phenomenological concept of worldliness and the loss of world in modernity -- The in-between world : anthropologizing the force of worlding -- The arriving world : the inhuman otherness of time as real messianic hope -- Postcolonial openings : how postcolonial literature becomes world literature -- Projecting a future world from the memory of precolonial time -- World heritage preservation and the expropriation of subaltern worlds -- Resisting humanitarianization -- Epilogue without conclusion : Stories without end(s)

Through an examination of debates about cosmopolitanism and human rights, Inhuman Conditions questions key ideas about what it means to be human. Cheah links influential arguments about the new cosmopolitanism to a perceptive examination of the older cosmopolitanism of Kant and Marx, and juxtaposes them with proliferating formations of collective culture to reveal the flaws in claims about the imminent decline of the nation-state and the obsolescence of popular nationalism.

This far-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink postcolonial theory's discussion of the nation and nationalism brings the problems of the postcolonial condition to bear on the philosophy of freedom. Closely identified with totalitarianism and fundamentalism, the nation-state has a tainted history of coercion, ethnic violence, and even, as in ultranationalist Nazi Germany, genocide. Most contemporary theorists are therefore skeptical, if not altogether dismissive, of the idea of the nation and the related metaphor of the political body as an organism. Going against orthodoxy, Pheng Cheah retr

pheng cheah teaches in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Inhuman Conditions:Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights in the Current Global Conjuncture(Harvard University Press, 2006) and Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (Columbia University Press, 2003) and the coeditor of Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (Routledge, 2003) and Cosmopolitics:Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (University of Minnesota Press,1998). He is currently working on a manuscript on financialization, human rights, and the inhuman for Harvard University Press.

pheng cheah teaches in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is coeditor of Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (University of Minnesota Press, 1998) and ofGrounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson(forthcoming with Routledge, 2003). This article is drawn from his forthcoming book, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (Columbia University Press, 2003). He is currently working on a manuscript on financialization, human rights, and the inhuman for Harvard University Press.