“Susan Stanford Friedman’s Planetary Modernisms (2015) asks us to rethink our habits of associating “modernism” with Euro-America. Comparing a number of specific cultures across three continents and eleven centuries, she shows how the historical conditions often ascribed to a uniquely advanced Europe—rapid technological innovation, artistic experimentation, social upheaval, and cosmopolitan mixing—also describe places and times that lie far off conventional maps of modernity, including Tang Dynasty China and Mughal India.”
“The work of art is an especially self-aware kind of knowing because it knows it is an artifice, a mere model. But if all models simplify or abstract in order to make sense of existence or experience, then all models—scientific and historical and artistic—do the work of world-making.
What Cheah and Seltzer together make clear is that it is time to stop arguing about whether or not “the world” in world literature is too large an object of study. What is really at stake in the charge against world literature is in fact one specific, exceptionally destructive model of the world that has done too much world-making already: the enforced homogenization of cultures to serve Euro-American interests.”
How to Make Worlds
“Susan Stanford Friedman’s Planetary Modernisms (2015) asks us to rethink our habits of associating “modernism” with Euro-America. Comparing a number of specific cultures across three continents and eleven centuries, she shows how the historical conditions often ascribed to a uniquely advanced Europe—rapid technological innovation, artistic experimentation, social upheaval, and cosmopolitan mixing—also describe places and times that lie far off conventional maps of modernity, including Tang Dynasty China and Mughal India.”
“The work of art is an especially self-aware kind of knowing because it knows it is an artifice, a mere model. But if all models simplify or abstract in order to make sense of existence or experience, then all models—scientific and historical and artistic—do the work of world-making.
What Cheah and Seltzer together make clear is that it is time to stop arguing about whether or not “the world” in world literature is too large an object of study. What is really at stake in the charge against world literature is in fact one specific, exceptionally destructive model of the world that has done too much world-making already: the enforced homogenization of cultures to serve Euro-American interests.”