What I send you are subtitles from a video "Conversation between Pheng Cheah and David

Damrosch, IWL Tokyo", help me punctuate and paragraph them:

This previous book is "Spectral Nationality" (2003), the same year as my own book. Very
interesting application, perhaps we should mention that a bit. I really wanted to think about a
couple of general questions regarding the relation between post-colonial and world literature
studies.

Joe's book seemed to me to have some commonalities with a couple of other recent books: Emily
Apter’s "Against World Literature" (2013) and "Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a
New Theory of World Literature" by the Warwick Collective (2015). These books raise several
questions which I'd like to illustrate with some dichotomies.

In these three books, there are starkly posed but not fully worked through dichotomies: one
between temporality versus history, particularly literary history; another between space versus
time, or the cartographic versus the temporal. It’s too straightforward to say that physical
cartography is merely descriptive while temporal remapping changes the world in a different way.

Another dichotomy is world versus nation. World literature is often assumed to be without
borders, yet the withering away of nations hasn't occurred, raising the question of how far world
literary studies can account for this. Finally, there's the political level: revolution versus reform, or
radicalism versus liberalism or progressivism. The term progressive is adopted by either branch.

I wanted to think about temporality versus history. One thing that struck me, having read these
three books relatively recently, is that Emily Apter's book discusses the need to rethink the
cartographies of time. She suggests that Eurochronology has to be abandoned. Though she
broaches this issue, virtually every example she gives is from the 20th century.

While it’s crucial to rethink modernism, it's just the tip of the iceberg of periodization. The term
modernism is less problematic than terms like medieval, classical, or ancient, which don't align as
neatly worldwide. Many examples in these books are from the last 50 years of literary
production, the most recent 2% of the history of literature to date.

In the United States, the Occupy Wall Street movement advocated for the 98%. Similarly, we
need to "occupy" comparative literature on behalf of the 98% of literary history, which is
increasingly occluded.

I want to ask Pheng about this. Your last comments begin to address my question, but what is the
trade-off in the strong concentration on the present? If we look at alternative temporalities while
including most of literary history, does that create a trade-off? These books don't go back before
1900. Is it necessary to shorten the temporal span to discuss alternative temporalities? What are
the gains and trade-offs?

Pheng Cheah: First of all, world history, as understood by scholars like Professor Haneda, Hegel,
and Marx, is a modern phenomenon emerging with the world market. From then on, one can
look back in history, including classical and ancient periods, and see a trajectory leading to
modernity. It's a history of modernity.

These different periods are included in world literature, but world literature is fundamentally a
formation of modernity. Regarding my choice of texts, unlike David’s book which deals with
literature from different periods and languages, my primary texts are novels written in English.
My teacher Benedict Anderson pointed out that despite discussing multiple temporalities, I only
used texts in English.

This was for pragmatic reasons. When giving talks based on the book, I never received questions
about the novels, only the theories, because people hadn’t read the novels. I initially planned to
write on a couple of Indonesian novels, including one by Mo Yan, the Chinese novelist, but
thought it unlikely people had read them. For accessibility, I chose texts more familiar to my
audience.

This also ties into the world literature paradigm: something needs to circulate to make an impact.
The novels I write about, though contemporary, attempt to resurrect past temporalities. For
instance, Amitav Ghosh’s novels incorporate mythic traditions from the Islamic world and South
Asia, while other authors draw on African traditions. They address other times and places, but
always with the present in mind.

The formation of world literature raises a simple question: who or what is it for? I believe it’s for
contemporary readers to make sense of the world. World literature, as part of the human
heritage, serves the present. Classical works like those of Aristotle and Euripides are included in
world literature because they are essential for understanding the present.

However, there’s a distinction. Writing about Indian classical literature as an area specialist is
different from writing about it as part of world literature. The former is a deep immersion, while
the latter involves making the past accessible for contemporary understanding.

David Damrosch: Accepting a kind of Hegelian teleology to some degree isn't necessary. Any
history is a history of the present, but taking the past on its own terms, not just how it's rewritten
recently, is different. For example, the world's first known patron of literature was King Shulgi of
Ur, who reigned in the 21st century BCE. In one of his poems, he imagines becoming world
literature at a time when only Sumerians and Egyptians could write.

He says, "Now I swear by the Sun God, and my younger brothers should be witness to it, that in
foreign lands where the sons of Sumer are not known, where people do not have the use of
paved roads—for example, Europe or Japan, or anywhere else where they have no access to the
written word, other than Egypt—that I, the firstborn son in the fashion of words, a composer of
songs, a composer of words, they will recite my songs as heavenly writings and they will bow
down before them."
The first known patron of literature is using literature to bolster his empire. He's creating a small
empire in southern Mesopotamia. We have the "Epic of Gilgamesh" today because he
commissioned songs about Gilgamesh. He was the third king of the Third Dynasty of Ur.
Gilgamesh was just up the road in Uruk, and Shulgi bolsters himself by making himself a kind of
cousin to Gilgamesh, commissioning poems that then become the epic.

Already, you see elements we're interested in today: the role of writing for empire and the
concept of futurity. This is a future-oriented endeavor, but you'll notice he's not interested in
capitalism, which doesn't yet exist for some millennia. Part of my question about the emphasis in
your and Emily's books, and the Warwick Collective's book, is that it seems the only kind of world
literature worth discussing critiques global capitalism, which implies a focus on very recent
literature. Older literature is used only in this context, suggesting that the only world literature
studies worth doing are those critiquing global capitalism as represented in these critiques.

There seems to be a dismissal of other approaches, which perhaps relates to the cartography of
space versus temporality. Describing the world spatially is seen as conservative, whereas
temporal remapping is seen as changing the world. But I wanted to suggest that different
versions of these exist everywhere, not just in the United States.

For example, in Germany, two recent books present very different approaches. One is Dietrich
Schwanitz's "Bildung," an idealistic Enlightenment handbook of world literature from the
Enlightenment to the present. In this book, literature is transcendent. Another is Siegfried Lenz's
"The New World Literature," which focuses on contemporary immigrant novels, emphasizing a
very current and grounded perspective. Both approaches have a role today, and each is
intertwined with elements of the other.

Pheng Cheah: So, no idea what cosmologically, so to speak, that means in relation to what. What
I'm saying is that this does mean something different. We have a broader sense of world
temporalities. If you imagine, as the Sumerians did, that kingship comes down from heaven as a
gift of the gods, the king represents the meeting place between the heavenly and the earthly.
This is a real world he envisions.

David Damrosch: This question of cartography also touches on revolution versus reform, or
radical versus progressive approaches. Consider the surrealists, such as Anaïs Nin, who viewed
comparative literature as an antidote to excessive nationalism. Surrealism sought to overcome
national divisions and barriers between the arts. Nin believed that through comparative literature
and the dissemination of surrealism, the world could be changed, not just described. This
approach embodies a commitment to transformative cartography, evident in works like Deleuze
and Guattari’s "A Thousand Plateaus."

One example is their surrealist map, which reimagines the world by disrupting traditional
meridians and latitudes. Instead of an equator, there's a wavy line, with the Pacific Ocean as the
center. England almost disappears, while Russia and China become prominent. This map changes
the world through cartographic description.
David Damrosch: So, I wonder whether it's necessary to say that the temporal aspect is the one
that changes, while thinking about circulation or mapping the world is somehow conservative or
just status quo. Because I don't think that's what they thought, or what I think we're doing.

Pheng Cheah: Well, I mean, you began with the temporality versus history distinction, and it
seems to me that history is a temporal category. So, history is not about space versus time.

David Damrosch: There is a certain sense that, even when I talk about it, it is realized.

Pheng Cheah: So the question is, but I think when the question is faced in earnest, it also comes
from things that are coming from places like Easter Island now—kinds of art we never saw
before. Things are coming from Ireland. Ireland now looks more important as a place for
revolutionary art than England does, polemically speaking. You could say the same with
Casanova; it's very pro-periphery. This is an engine of literary development in regions within the
contemporary world.

David Damrosch: So it just seemed to me that it's not an either/or situation—that the spatial is as
revolutionary or as progressive as the temporal can be.

Pheng Cheah: Well, I guess the question is, I mean, yes, if you think about circulation—and I'm
certainly not discounting it, because I think this is the major point of contention—the way that
you’ve...

David Damrosch: What you're suggesting is that my sense of circulation is...

Pheng Cheah: No, I know, but I mean, of course, that's not the case. Now think about, say, he
looks at how the bottle has been used by African-American...

Pheng Cheah: The main question is, for me—and once again, that's why I began by saying, for
me, what is it...

David Damrosch: [Music]

Pheng Cheah: The other thing is, I guess, one thing I should have made clear is that there seems
to be—and partly that's because of the circulation of commodities—is always now, of course...

There are ways of understanding the circulation of commodities in a way that is progressive. If
you think about my teacher, Benedict Anderson's book, *Print Capitalism*, print capitalism
produces something that is progressive, that is to say, for him, the nation. But for me, it seems
that the link to capitalism is always going to be there with commodity circulation. So it's not a
matter of just saying circulation as such; it's always about analyzing, in this or that particular case,
when circulation is progressive.
The other distinction that you made is revolution versus reform, which corresponds to radicalism
for me. And maybe this is my...

David Damrosch: When you talk about this kind of, it seemed to me a little bit like that something
just by virtue that this is...

Pheng Cheah: Of course, partly these passages are mentioned from fifteen years ago, and I've
tried to think of it since then. In part, that circulation seemed to me a good starting point, partly
because, as you say, you wouldn't be able to teach Amitav Ghosh unless the book's in the market
to assign to students, whether online or otherwise, and they can't have these progressive effects.

I think Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has a very nice book, *In the House of the Interpreter*, where he says
that in colonial Kenya, they were assigned Shakespeare and Elocution to make them good
subjects. He and his friends in high school learned, "Oh, you can overthrow a monarch!" There’s a
good example. And I have been thinking also—I mean, the identity is teaching the second half
here—that makes a real point in your book, *Classical World Literature*, that circulation models
are not that interesting for the ancient world because a lot of stuff didn’t circulate. If you're going
to think about ancient world literature, you're comparing works from cultures that were quite
distinct, and she does a very smart job with that.

But I've also been thinking more about the world and the nation, and I agree totally that a good
study of world literature should not assume the borders have evaporated or that the nation is no
longer a meaningful entity. On the contrary, I think this is true even if we think of the heyday of
nationalism, but still today, more than ever, and particularly we feel this very much in small
countries.

David Damrosch: I was thinking about a couple of libraries in Ljubljana, how the world exists in
the nation. This was the first library open to the public, the Seminary Library, early eighteenth-
century. It's a magnificent structure with Italian artists' frescoes. At the top, the muse is holding
up the Bible to God, suggesting that books lead you to reverence for God. Then there's the
National and University Library, designed by a Slovene architect in the 30s. You come up this
stairway and progress from darkness to enlightenment, as he described it. You can see the
glowing reading room that you come to. In this library, books lead you to reverence for books and
for the nation. It's built as an expression of Slovene cultural identity, just at the time when
Slovenia was trying to gain some independence from under the thumb of Serbia and Croatia after
the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, after a millennium of the Holy Roman Empire.

What's interesting to me is how important the world is to creating this national identity in the
30s, in the 20th century. The older kind of internationalism of the Latin tradition is represented in
the Seminary Library—a kind of unity of knowledge. My hosts, who were showing me the survey,
said it's a shame that once the university was established and the new library was built, they split
up the collection of the Seminary Library. The theological works went to the theological faculty,
and the literature went to the National Library. It's separated now, and that serves a nationalistic
purpose in a narrow sense. My host was saying this is the kind of Slovene nation that is inherently
international. You see this also in the national poet France Prešeren, whose poem "A Toast"
becomes the national anthem:

"God's blessing on all nations who long and work for that bright day
when o'er Earth's habitations no war, no strife shall hold its sway;
who long to see that all men free, no more shall foes, but neighbors be."

This is the national anthem of Slovenia, this internationalist hymn. It's interesting because
Prešeren died in 1849, but it was not until 1989 that his poem became the national anthem. It
was created and protected by law just when Slovenia was on its way to becoming an independent
nation a couple of years later.

I think very much, increasingly myself, there's a kind of figure-ground reversal between the world
and the nation. I used to more or less think of here's the nation, and there's a world outside. But
if you think in terms of markets, not as a metaphor but as actuality, the world exists only within a
national market, a national purpose, national culture—progressive, regressive, or whatever it
may be.

My final real question to pursue a bit more is the revolution versus the reform. It seems to me
that in books like Emily's and the Warwick Group's, and in elements of your work probably also,
the focus is so strong on those works that are critiquing global capitalism that it subverts the
particulars of the world's literature being produced even today, even in the global South. I was
thinking about Benedict Anderson's book and asking myself about Pramoedya Ananta Toer,
whom you have written about brilliantly. He is mentioned, I think, a few points by Anderson, who
was a great specialist in Indonesia, but he was also a great specialist in Thai literature and
produced a whole volume of collections of Thai literature. But he does not talk about Kukrit
Pramoj.

Here’s an author that surprises me by not appearing—not just in Benedict's work but in
anybody's work. Who are these people, and what would it be to add a Kukrit to it? Kukrit is a
remarkable author of four-generation narratives about modernity, the coming of the nation, and
the turn of the century up to the present. Of course, the *Buru Quartet*, on which I think no one
has written more brilliantly than Pheng Cheah in his *Spectral Nationality* book, followed by a
few years, a decade later, by Kukrit. Kukrit’s work is richly serialized. It covers the reigns of Rama
V, VI, VII, and VIII. Rama V is the equivalent of the Meiji Emperor in the late 19th century, the
reformist modernizer emperor, and then his three successors up to the end of World War II and
the Japanese occupation. This period is told through a heroine who goes to court and lives across
these generations. It's one volume, but it's a four-cycle thing.

A few years before the *Buru Quartet*, Kukrit was a really interesting guy. He started out as an
anti-colonial writer. His first book, written with his brother, tries to restore historicity and voice to
Rama V, who becomes a model for the Hollywoodized Anna and the King of Siam. They were so
outraged by this Hollywood film that they wrote this book when they were quite young to say,
"This is the real thing." Kukrit then founds a newspaper—perfect for Benedict Anderson—called
Siam Rath, the Siam Nation. He founds a political party, becomes an actor, literally an actor. He's
also a specialist in classical dance and stages an adaptation of *Rama V*, in which he acts one of
the starring roles. He then acts with Marlon Brando in a film called *The Ugly American*, in
which he portrays the Prime Minister of a Southeast Asian country, dealing with US involvement
in Indochina. Ten years later, he becomes Prime Minister of Thailand. You cannot make this stuff
up.

**David Damrosch:** And I asked myself, why is he never talked about? I mean, it touches
everything that we should be interested in. The only things I could think of now—Pramoedya is a
brilliant writer, but Kukrit is a really interesting writer, never discussed. The only differences I
could really think of why Benedict Anderson doesn’t mention him are twofold. One is that Kukrit
is not a leftist; he’s a royalist. And he's not a secularist; he’s a Buddhist.

His other best book available in English is called *Many Lives*. It envisions what happens after a
ferry in the river that flows through Bangkok is overturned, and all these people have died. He
tells a series of stories of how their own Dharma led them to this point. It’s a very beautiful,
interesting, profoundly Buddhist book. There's a Buddhist subtext to *Four Reigns* as well.

Now, the thing about Kukrit is that he's a kind of progressive conservative, if one can say that.
He's a modernist, a modernizer, with a very strong interest in women's culture. He has strong
heroines, as you have all shown with Pramoedya's *Buru Quartet*, maybe even somewhat more
so. In Kukrit, you know, he should be in the mix, but he's never discussed.

I think that in terms of the cartography of circulation, it’s really important for those of us who are
activists within our contexts to try to open out to a broader, more capacious range, whether it is
the global South, Southeast Asia, or the politics of narrative going on. It struck me that the
imbalances we’re dealing with can be represented by a chart I did a couple of years ago. How
often are people discussed in the MLA International Bibliography?

So, the hyper-Canon—I picked at random a few writers I’m interested in: Woolf, Joyce, they’re
writing in English, French, German, and Spanish. The kind of upper major and lower majors, like
upper middle class or lower middle class. Then, minor authors, and what I’m going to call ultra
minor writers. We have Pramoedya, Multatuli (the great Dutch writer whom Pramoedya is
rewriting), and Kukrit.

Most importantly, there’s R.K. Narayan, whose museum is a block from here. What you see is
these writers, by and large, are not writing in the big four or five languages. These extremely
important writers—now, this is just in this decade—Pramoedya has been written about forty-five
times according to the MLA Bibliography. Kukrit? Only once. One article, five pages long, a
biographical survey. Just nothing about him.

It seems to me that we've only begun to do what we have to do, as literary activists, to open out
the world to the range of writers who are being occluded for all kinds of reasons. This includes
the filters that, in general, postcolonial studies have put on the archive that they're willing to look
at.

**Pheng Cheah:** No, I mean, I agree with you. But let’s backtrack a little and talk about the
world and nation thing. I don't think we disagree there. Because with every kind of nation, you’re
really talking about needing to establish themselves as a nation culturally to gain respect. It’s a
kind of international recognition—you have to be recognized.

For instance, this was the basis of Weimar classicism. Then, of course, what you get in the
linguistic revolutions of 1848 is precisely this kind of thing. Every socialist constitution has some
kind of internationalist rhetoric built in. People forget socialism was not really cosmopolitanism in
practice; it was largely internationalism.

So, in that sense, you are first a member of a nation, and through the nation...

**David Damrosch:** The Marxist...

**Pheng Cheah:** The other thing is about why the Thai writer does not figure. There is
obviously some kind of bias.

Writers and theorists, including in my own writing, often have a bias toward certain perspectives
and traditions.

**David Damrosch:** And I think—I mean, in a certain way everyone has these kinds of biases. I
mean, not to justify it, but certainly, a more radical reworking of the world is one that happens
through the revolutionary tradition. The question is, revolution is not always possible. I would
say, even now, that revolution is no longer possible, in which case, there are other kinds of
writing that would be important.

Now, the royalist aspect—before he passed away, Ben was actually writing a book on monarchies.
He had a great distaste for them because of his background. So, my sense is that, for the sheer
reason that this person is royalist, politically, he would not be interested in such a writer. The
other thing is translations and markets and commodities.

You mentioned Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Of course, people know very well that at one point, when he
started writing, he was James Ngugi. Then he decided he no longer wanted to bear the yoke of
colonialism, so he removed the "James" and started writing only in Kikuyu. But once he only
wrote in Kikuyu, the books were censored and banned in Kenya. They only survived in English
translation. That was when, after moving from NYU to Irvine, he started the Center for Writing
and Translation.

When he became very interested in translation and those kinds of things, he recalled the
example from *Decolonizing the Mind*. He talks about words—words like daffodils. What would
it mean for a child who had never seen a daffodil in his or her life to identify with this flower? Or
to think about the seasons—winter, spring—when you live in Africa and those seasons don't
exist? For him, it was a kind of brainwashing that had very bad effects.

So, on the one hand, transformation in the circulation of texts can be positive. But it's more than
just texts. If you think about it, the colonial teaching of European literature was part of the
curriculum in many countries. That’s probably one of the first institutionalized examples of world
literature. It was used for a certain purpose.

**Pheng Cheah:** And I think Gauri Viswanathan discusses this kind of thing. So, that has to be
borne in mind. On the other hand, I'm not against markets. I think, for instance, that one
Indonesian author, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, wrote a book called *The Fugitive*, which has only
been translated after I published my book. I did write on him in a very recent article in
*Diacritics*. But the reason why...

**David Damrosch:** The novels are a series of manuscripts, but the revolutionary is
imprisoned. And the only way for the books to survive is to give them to someone he trusts. But
that person has migrated to France, so that’s the new home, so to speak, of the spirit of the
nation. And of course, the tickets, the translator who’s a diplomat, gets expelled from the
country. Transmission—these are important. But in my case, the association of circulation with
commodity circulation and capitalism has to be borne in mind.

**Pheng Cheah:** Exactly. And we must consider those kinds of effects. In fact, the teaching of
English literature often shifts attention away from local texts and traditions.

**David Damrosch:** Then I think the larger question is, just as the fully fledged notion of world
literature needs to be expanded, it needs to incorporate a version of globalization that is more
inclusive. It’s important to reground some idea of world literature on these different world
concepts from different languages.

**Pheng Cheah:** Yes, and it’s also important to take into account all these links. To know what
these concepts are in that sense—the importance of translation. But at the same time, we should
be greedy and have it both ways, linking up with this depth and breadth of global narratives.