Compound Eyes and Limited Visions:Wu Ming-Yi’s “Weak Anthropocentric” Gaze for World Literature

Inspired by Pheng Cheah’s insights on the overlooked temporal dimension of postcolonial world literature, this article will explore Wu Ming-Yi’s “worlding” process by delving into the heterotemporalities in his works. Focusing on Wu Ming-Yi’s 2015 novel The Stolen Bicycle, I propose to read Wu’s works as self-referential and allegorical critiques of world literature, which foreground fissures in translation, ever-ongoing yet incomplete knowledge production, and the encounters with the nonhuman other. I argue that through the heterotemporalities on both the formal and narrative levels, Wu Ming-Yi offers an alternative way of seeing and worlding Taiwanese literature, a self-critical position which he himself terms “weak anthropocentricism” and which points to an ecological time beyond the totalizing teleology of globalization.