ABSTRACT
This Conclusion revisits the book’s key arguments and discusses their relevance in the contemporary geopolitical and cultural context. The competing conceptions of the world that emerged during the Cold War and in the wake of decolonization did not disintegrate in 1989. China is a case in point here. Emboldened by its growing economic and political clout, China has set out to remake the world in its own image and sees culture as instrumental in this effort. While China’s competing conception of world culture remains superficially Marxist in inspiration and rooted in its historical opposition to Western imperialism, it resorts to a similarly exclusionary rationale—an example of this is the Chinese authorities’ stance on queer culture. The question that arises is what world literature and world art will look like when new worlds like China achieve hegemony. The field of World Literature can not only broaden its horizons by welcoming the critical voices on its margins that have highlighted questions ranging from the postcolonial to (un)translatability. World Literature can also use these insights to begin undertaking the critique of emerging worlds.
