https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.n38.02
Shu-mei Shih
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
shih@humnet.ucla.ed
Abstract:
This essay aims to intervene into the disciplinary silos that has so far prevented meaningful cross-fertilizations among different intellectual formations across the studies of “world literature,” “world history,” “world art,” “world music,” “world cinema” and so on into an aggregate called “world studies.” As global interconnectedness becomes more and more acute as well as intimate in our contemporary moment, not only due to economic and cultural globalization but also due to the deepening ecological crisis, the study of the world as such, however it is defined from different epistemological and ontological standpoints, requires a concerted cross-disciplinary effort. Using world literature and world history as examples, this essay enacts such a cross-disciplinary effort, while cautioning against the erection of any alternative centrisms in our necessary deconstruction of Eurocentrism our studies of the world.
Keywords: World studies, the West and the Rest, provincialization of the West, defetishization of the Rest, integrative world history, connected histories, world systems theory, holy quaternity of discursive power.
