Pheng Cheah's Spectrality

As we conclude Part I of the course and move into issues of area studies, social science, and translation, Pheng Cheah's work demonstrates one possible avenue of theoretical engagement. Like our course, Spectral Nationality comprises two parts, roughly divided between (German) philosophy and (Kenyan and Indonesian) literature. Cheah's exposition of the organismic metaphor of the social and political body extends to his discussion of the writings of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Underlying Cheah's approach is his contention that "all work should ultimately be comparative and collaborative, open to the disruption of the other" (13).

Cheah seems to be seeking some middle ground between the universal and the particular. Neither does he blindly apply European theoretical models to African and Asian sociopolitical realities, nor does he privilege the latter in such a way as to exclude their cultural productions from broader consideration. Instead, he engages the two, revealing the productive disruptions to which he alludes in his introduction.

One of the more striking developments to emerge from this engagement is Cheah's analysis of Pramoedya Ananta Toer: "for Pramoedya, the decolonizing or postcolonial nation is not congenitally infected by a colonialist will to domination because he does not regard modernity and enlightenment as Europe's exclusive property" (280). For me, this position is rich in possibility, for it offers an alternative to the limitations of postcolonial discourse. By negating the cultural specificity of modernity and enlightenment, it enables new formations of subjectivity and nationalism that are closer to the elusive ideal of freedom.