ABSTRACT
Let us now explain worldism. As suggested by Salman Rushdie above, worldism theorizes about how “a bit of this and a bit of that” builds “newness” into the world. It is this creative connection that we illustrate in this chapter. Toward this end, this chapter identifies worldism’s main features and their intellectual precedents: i.e., constructivism, postmodernism, and postcolonial studies, along with Marxist and feminist contributions to history, philosophy, and revolutionary practice. We also chart how worldism differs from them in significant ways. To fully introduce worldism, this chapter continues into the next two, Chapters Six and Seven, by demonstrating, respectively, the role of fiction and poetry as methods for worldism and examples of worldist intervention into three sites of contemporary world politics: (a) the “Cyprus problem,” (b) US-India-China “triangulation,” and (c) the “global war on terror.” Chapter Eight concludes the book by returning to those issues raised in Part I: the politics of erasure, neoliberal desire and violence, complicity in knowledge production, and the hegemonic ontology of fear and property. Chapter Eight also ends with a dramatic sequence. It features that classical Subaltern Man, Shakespeare’s Othello, and what happens when he encounters a worldist approach to life.
