The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization

(Paperback)

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Literary and cultural studies departments across the countries have undergone radical changes after 9/11 and the editors and authors of "The Worlding Project" are proposing a brand-new way of talking about world literature and cultural studies. It proposes to open up an original array of alternative concepts and tactics, doing cultural studies in a new, more inclusive way. With the widespread globalization of culture, literature, and the arts, categories such as first world/third world, elite/popular, East/West, and colonial/postcolonial lack the specificity and organizing clarity they once had. "The Worlding Project" hopes to present a new way of talking about cultural studies, to present the idea of "worlding" as a prominent claim that knowledge and critical practices can range across geographic and cultural categories.

Reviews

A remarkably timely book that shakes up the political pessimism and intellectual ennui of the past decade by a powerful articulation of a new field imaginary that is place-based yet transnational, and by trenchant critiques. . . . Worlding emerges as a form of politics evoking the world Sixties and a critical method beyond prevailing academic fashions, offering a vision for a future that is divergent from neoliberal globalization.
Shu-mei Shih, author of The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 19171937 and Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific

Today, more than twenty years after Saids The World, The Text, and the Critic, what does it mean to practice worldly criticism In a time of deep political pessimism that has many of us scrambling for the modest sanctuary afforded by academic disciplinary tradition, this collection of essays from Santa Cruz provides a moving reminder of the integrityand necessityof Cultural Studies.
Colleen Lye, author of Americas Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 18931945

The Worlding Project takes an important step towards bringing Cultural Studies into studies of the Pacific, and the Pacific into Cultural Studiesmore of the latter than the former, as the essays constitute something like a Pacific challenge to Cultural Studies. The essays are admirably sensitive to the politics of the Pacific, and the struggles for hegemony over it.
Arif Dirlik, author of The Postcolonial Aura

Author Bio

Rob Wilson has been a professor of transnational and postcolonial literatures at the University of California at Santa Cruz since 2001. The founding editor of the Berkeley Poetry Review, Wilson was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a doctorate in English in 1976. He has also taught in the English Department at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and Korea University in Seoul and was a visiting professor of literature at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Christopher Leigh Connery teaches World Literature and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Cruz, where he also co-directs the Center for Cultural Studies. He has a PhD in East Asian Studies, and has published Empire of the Text- Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China as well as other works about the global 1960s and about oceanic thinking. He recently edited a collection of essays on the Asian Sixties.