3.1 Globalize Classics!

Among the new initiatives projects on the “Ancient World” are strikingly prominent. The NYU-affiliated Institute for the Study of the Ancient World is to date probably the largest such enterprise. But numerous other initiatives have sprung up: Stanford University’s “Ancient Chinese and Mediterranean Empires Comparative History Project”; McGill’s and Northwestern University’s “Global Antiquities” initiatives; Chinese University of Hong Kong’s “Center for the Comparative Study of Antiquity”; or also summer schools like the “Globalizing Classics” summer course symposium at Humboldt University in 2015. Despite their reference to the “global” these initiatives tend to focus, narrowly, on comparisons of Greco-Roman (plus perhaps Near Eastern) antiquity and China, mapping onto the world’s current economic powerhouses and the political metageography of our historical moment. Also, some of these initiatives are limited to particular disciplines, such as archeology or institutional history. To my knowledge there is currently no initiative that we could actually call “global” and that aims to really be global by creating new comparative methodologies through a holistic transdisciplinary humanistic perspective.

I believe that this is what we need: a collaborative initiative that is inclusively global, conceptually comparative, and based on rigorous historical and philological research. Growing this out of a focus on Antiquity has its advantages. This is the period when formative cultural orientations and genealogies of cultural knowledge and practices developed that enable particularly productive cross-cultural comparisons. Second, “Classics” as a Western field of study, is, proverbially, “the oldest area studies field,” with a strongly transdisciplinary perspective. Also, today, antiquity is the period that is most often instrumentalized politically for populist collective identity formation and nation branding, which imposes an ethical imperative on “classicists” around the world to speak out against such abuses, wherever this happens, in India, China, Israel or Hungary.

We have a long way to go. Although any culture of longer historical standing has its own share of “classical periods” or “classical texts,” “classicists” are not created equal. The unqualified label “Classics” still only applies to the Western European Greco-Roman heritage and its study. At least four types of glass ceilings hinder the globalization of “Classics.”

• Our reluctance to let go of the cultural capital that comes with the universalization of the Greco-Roman tradition as “Classics” par excellence, and, in Europe or North America, the natural local attachment to that tradition as “ours,” despite increasing demographic diversity.

• The international authority that western Classicists enjoy in contrast to the often more locally limited agency of classicists in non-Western countries.

• Relatedly, the ideological, often nationalist, pressures to which classicists outside of the West are subjected in their native countries; or the discrimination, sometimes even violent threats, directed at Westerners who study the history of cultures beyond Europe, which non-Western populist, nationalistic countries claim today as their own alone.

• Intriguingly, the marginalization of the postclassical Latin, and the Eastern Greek/Byzantine classical, heritage within Western “Classics.”

Nobody would want to deny that classical periods, values, canons, and classical studies existed outside of Europe. But Western Classics scholars have faced a formidable challenge in seeing their field drastically shrink over the past century from a royal discipline embodying the universal foundations of general education and moral edification, to a waning field among many devoted to the study of one particular – even if still particularly hegemonic – region. Addressing this cognitive quantum leap from universality to problematically universalized particularity requires much time, shared intellectual effort, and mutual thoughtfulness.

In the meantime, scholars of their native classical traditions beyond the West have not just lacked international status as “classicists” but often face ideological pressures at home. Take the case of East Asia, where since the turn of the twentieth century the rise of nationalisms and “national studies” (國學; in particular in the patriotic fields of literature and history) have made scholars of classical traditions and archeologists into important players in the creation of collective identity and global nation branding. Typically, they do not have an international status as the interpreters of the world’s foundational civilizations. And scholars of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese classical traditions working in their native countries are inevitably agents constrained by the limits of “national studies.”

Consider this: a Chinese scholar of Chinese classical literature sits at the heart of the national paradigm and can speak on a national stage; but a Japanese scholar of Japanese literature written in Literary Chinese, Japan’s dominant language of government, elite education, Buddhism, and belles lettres from the eighth through the twentieth centuries, is marginalized in “national literature studies,” which centers around a vernacular Japanese canon created around the turn of the twentieth century in the midst of Japanese empire-building – symbolized by the grand vernacular novel The Tale of Genji, written by the eleventh-century court lady Murasaki Shikibu. The deep nationalism of classical studies in the East Asian countries stands in stark contrast to the largely “transnational” discipline of (Western) “Classics” since Hellenistic times, or at least the Renaissance. True, we see different schools and academic styles in Germany, Italy, or Greece, and more differences even within these national traditions. Still, no one nation can claim “Classics” as their national monopoly. In the PRC, research on Chinese culture by foreigners and scholars working outside of China is lumped together as “Overseas Chinese Studies” (haiwai hanxue 海外漢學), as distinct from Chinese national studies. Needless to say, there is no such thing as “Overseas Greek Studies,” today’s Hellenic Republic is not the center for the study of Ancient Greece, nor do scholars around the world have to publish in modern Greek to be heard and respected. Yet, research on the classical literatures of China, Japan, or Korea happens overwhelmingly in their respective national languages and national literature departments and research of premodern East Asia in the region is severely hampered by debilitating language barriers, as the more senior generation of scholars have typically very little knowledge of other East Asian languages or the new lingua franca that is gradually replacingthe now dead Literary Chinese: Global English.

But even Western classicists are not created equal. Renaissance and Baroque writers applied Hesiod’s and Ovid’s decline model of four ages of the world – golden, silver, bronze, iron – to the history of literature (Ax). Until recently studying “silver-age,” post-Augustan Latinity, was considered second best at best. By now Late Antiquity has been enthusiastically rediscovered, as a new golden age of sorts blending excitingly into the Medieval. But it seems unlikely that Medieval Latin and Neo-Latin Studies will ever play a central role in either Classics or national literature departments. Ernst Robert Curtius’s grand dream of understanding European literatures through their shared Latin roots is unlikely to be realized unless European national literature departments hire more faculty with serviceable Latin skills, relevant cultural historical knowledge, and a fresh, cosmopolitan and de-nationalized mindset. As an offspring of the Latin West the field of Classics has had little incentive to grant Byzantine studies a proper place in the master narrative of Western civilization. The cliché of a gulf between Europe’s West and East has been further enhanced by centuries of Ottoman rule over Greece, negative images of the “Balkans” as a region of irrational ethnic strife, orthodox Christianity, the iron curtain, and its aftermath in post-socialist Southeastern Europe, plus Greece’s image of an economic problem child in the European Union.

How can we reshape the grossly uneven landscape of “classical studies,” here just briefly sketched for the East Asia and the West? A landscape deformed by inequality, neocolonial and nationalist ideologies, political pressures, and, often unconsciously, culturalist pride? I believe we need to both globalize “Classics” and localize it. “Classics” has to become “classical studies” of the world’s civilizations, not just of Greco-Roman antiquity. This will allow our concepts of the classical – its canons, values, periods, people, works, uses in the present – to drastically diversify. Opening the door to transforming “Classics” into globalized “classical studies” is a comparatively easy act for Western academics: it only requires some generosity and curiosity. But scholars working in regions that tap native traditions to fuel nationalism or religious extremism, such as in parts of Asia and the Middle East, are likely to be severely limited in their freedom to “globalize” classics, torn between the historical record and their academic integrity, and threatened by ideological demands and political repression. This shows the urgent need to also “localize” classical studies: “localizing” classical studies requires us to understand the specific pressures and actual dangers classical scholars face in particular regions of the world.

Ironically, the de-politicization of Western “Classics” has contributed to its waning importance in the 20th century. If it weren’t for the tragic effects of ideological pressures and fears of political repression, Western classicists might even envy the degree of center-stage “relevancy” of classical studies in the daily life and politics of nationalist states with resolute nativist interest groups. Think of India’s successful attempt to have June 21 declared International Yoga Day by the UN (where is Roman wrestling on the UN agenda?). “Localizing classics” for Western Classicists of the Greco-Roman world means to re-understand classical studies as a deeply political responsibility. We need to be awake to the living uses and abuses of classical traditions and studies around the world and generous and astute in supporting colleagues facing those challenges.

3.2 Dare to Compare!

“My befuddlement with comparison is primarily methodological and epistemological in nature. But I’m also befuddled by its stunted presence in our disciplinary discourses – the first of several conundrums I want to share here. […] the disquiet with comparison seems to be ubiquitous – it’s the crazy uncle in the attic you try not to talk about” (Pollock “Conundrums of Comparison” 273–274). Sheldon Pollock diagnoses a rampant “comparative deficit” and reflects on the challenges and benefits of pushing for new methodologies of comparison. In an earlier article he contrasts the systematic development of comparative methodology in the social sciences into a subdiscipline with an “unconcern with the theory of comparativism” in the humanities, in particular in comparative intellectual history and comparative literature (Pollock “Comparison Without Hegemony” 186 f.). Disciplinary discussions of comparison have a long genealogy, emerging in more systematic form in the nineteenth century with new disciplines such as Comparative Linguistics and Comparative Literature. The classicist Walter Scheidel is equally stunned by “comparative deficit” in historical studies: “In the study of History, comparative analysis remains rare. Explicit reflection on the uses, methodology and problems of historical comparison is rarer still. In this respect, the divide between History as an academic discipline that has at least occasionally been counted among the Social Sciences and fields such as Economics, Political Science and Sociology is as wide as it can be.” (Scheidel 40). With long-standing debates on cultural comparison originating with Johann Gottfried Herder, Madame de Staël, or the Transylvanian scholar Hugó Meltzl of Lomnitz, a founding figure of Comparative Literature in the 1870s; with the recent notable increase of edited volumes juxtaposing case studies drawn from different parts of the world on anything from court culture, foreign encounters, and travelogues to “world philology,” history of the book, or history of science; and with comparative data analysis being daily business in the social sciences – why do especially scholars of premodern cultures diagnose a “comparative deficit”? Even despite prominent recent publications explicitly devoted to comparison, such as a special issue on comparison in New Literary History (2009, no. 40.3) or Rita Felski’s and Susan S. Friedman’s influential Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses (2013)?

One reason is the conceptual fuzziness of “comparison.” It is actually a complex of various, at times only vaguely related, practices rather than a concept, and it treacherously glosses over a variety of widely divergent approaches under the same umbrella term.

As a basic cognitive faculty that triggers the forming of judgements based on the juxtaposition of at least two things, the breathtaking semantic breadth of “comparison” reaches from the myriad “comparative” activities that guide our daily lives, such as comparison of prices for goods and services, of neighbors, or of siblings, to academic forms of “comparisons,” based on, typically, statistics for the quantitative social sciences or qualitative comparanda for the interpretive humanities. “Comparisons” can be vertical – juxtaposing phenomena from the same tradition, for example comparing the readership of novels in eighteenth- with those of twentieth-century England; or it can be horizontal, in, very roughly, two ways: first, comparing for example twenty-first-century British novels with anglophone novels by various postcolonial writers in Africa or Asia. Or comparing archaic Greek poetry with the ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry (ca. 600 BCE). These two horizontal types of comparisons are actually radically different forms of “comparison” that require a different methodological repertoire. Of the first type are comparisons with shared historical genealogies that are thus a form of reception studies or studies of transcultural exchanges, as we now prefer to say to more equitably highlight mutual engagement in the process. The overwhelming majority of comparative studies in the humanities practices actually this form of “comparison,” within traditions or across traditions related in time and space. Our own visceral experience of globalization and mindset of glocal connectedness, via the internet, fair trade products or local organic food, makes us revel in maritime networks, trade routes, and in processes of diaspora, translation, and transculturation. These are all current areas of vibrant interest creating empowering new insights and, in the case of research on premodern periods, uncovering patterns of global interconnectedness before our own “Global Age” proper. We naturally pay attention to stories of cultural reception and transcultural interaction. “Global Studies,” the study of transnational phenomena in particular from an economic, political, sociological, and institutional perspective, has been the trendsetter in research about globalization, but it is no coincidence, that otherwise comparison-critical historians spearheaded “Global History” parallel to the rise of Global Studies. This tacit kinship between Global Studies and Global History is plainly visible in recent reference works like The Oxford Handbook of Global Studies (2019), which admits only one of the core humanities disciplines into their purview: History. Needless to say, the kinship between studies of globalization and Global History risks to anachronistically project connectivity optimism onto earlier periods in history.

But in their diagnosis of a comparative deficit Pollock and Scheidel are not talking about either the vertical or the first – genealogical – horizontal type of comparatism. They point here to methodologies of comparison of the second horizontal type: the comparative juxtaposition of cultural production in historically unrelated cultures. It is precisely the lack of connectivity that requires a different comparatist tool set – although it is, ironically, twenty-first-century globalization that enables us to research the previous lack of connection between cultures.

3.3 What Travels, and What Doesn’t, and Why? The Trouble with the Non-Genealogical

We can restrain our connectivity optimism and construe globalization as a gradual, yet relentlessly inevitable densening of connective networks over the past centuries or millennia, or even show the downsides of connectivity, blatantly visible with the COVID 19 pandemic (Gänger & Osterhammel). But it is terribly difficult to unthink globalization and “switch off” this most subcutaneous catalyst of our quotidian experience and mindset. “Reception” or “transculturation” has become our cognitive default. It is hard to imagine that things might not travel. But different things have always travelled in different ways, and overall, much less so before the nineteenth century. Take “silk” versus “canonical poetry.” Silk travelled from China across Eurasia to places of voracious demand. The Roman Senate issued several edicts banning Chinese silk (or, as Tacitus relates, in 14 CE the wearing of silk clothing by males) to avoid trade imbalances. For men it was considered effeminate and “oriental”; and it was shunned as being too transparent and sensual on the pious bodies of Roman women. Silk traveled mostly through small local networks whose traders would move within the region (Hansen), but its high demand made it a “global item” already in antiquity.

But what about elite poetry, a comparably highly prized good? Take for example the China’s Classic of Poetry, or Virgil’s Aeneid. The first complete translations of the Classic of Poetry into Western languages date to the nineteenth century and the first complete Chinese translation of the Aeneid, first attempted in 1930, was only published in 1984 (Liu)! Despite its towering status in its respective cultures, canonical poetry often hardly travelled beyond the immediate cultural sphere, where it was canonized as part of the educational curriculum, in the case of Rome, the Hellenistic and Roman empires, and for China, the Sinographic Sphere of East Asia. We might attribute the difference in “connectivity” between China and Rome/Europe, by a few millennia, to the difference between travelling “objects” versus “texts.” But things can get far more complicated when we even just focus on texts. Prose tales and fiction, such as the Jātaka Tales about the Buddha, or epic romances about Alexander the Great spread widely across the Eurasian continent, passing through multiple languages and cultures; Buddha tales even inspired the many versions of Barlaam and Josaphat, a widely popular story of a pious prince that was adapted to different religious milieus as it reached the Middle East and Europe. Protagonists, plot elements, and didactic purpose took new shapes on their way across the continent. Silk, ritual vessels, religious statues or beliefs, ideologies, governance techniques, popular literature, court poetry, and lastly, books – as the material object can obviously travel independently of its content – all travelled at different speed and on different grounds and conditions.

So here is a false paradox: do we need to treat Buddhist popular tales, where plot is much more mobile than the precise diction and meter of elite poetry, along a “reception” vector, but canonical poetry along a “comparative vector”? That seems intuitively wrong. Is the disjunction between mobility and high status in the textual/genre hierarchy culturally specific? If so, what does that imply for cultural transfer in particular across script and cosmopolitan language boundaries? When and why is “pop culture” necessarily the more mobile traveler than elite traditions? Where, what, and how is the “transition” between genealogical and purely “connectionless” comparisons?

These are some of the exciting questions that deserve our attention and the development of new methodologies. The comparative deficit is all the more dire, because non-genealogical comparisons have a bad reputation for being either unproductive or hegemonic. An older variant, in East-West comparisons since the nineteenth century has been assumption of an “ellipsis” (Denecke 12–13) the juxtaposition of cultures that results in detecting what the other is “missing” (the scientific revolution? Epic poetry? Concepts of truth and metaphysics? Potatoes?). This is definitely “comparison with hegemony” (to echo Sheldon Pollock’s “Comparison Without Hegemony”), an ignominiously imperialistic version of comparatism. Kinder versions of this approach attempt to somehow identify X (Human rights? Philosophy? Technology?) in all cultures to ensure that all people on earth have equal right to produce such cultural capital from their own histories. As much as we can morally appreciate the Samaritan impulse in these ecumenical versions of comparatism, it creates no transformative new knowledge, especially because the very definitions of “Philosophy” or “Human Rights” are defined by universalizing Western concepts. Even worse, the Samaritan approach erases radical cultural differences that would need critical comparative, historical assessment if we want comparatism to produce historical and cultural knowledge rather than serve as a tool for global redemption and peace-making. “Everybody had it (or, tragically and regrettably not)” is nothing more than a slogan of comparative branding and mending of nations and their histories. We need comparisons that enable transformative insights about both sides of the comparison.

Short-cutting the search for new comparative methodologies by retreating into methodologically less challenging studies of transcultural interaction would conceptually impoverish the new global humanities. True, the focus on transregional networks has increasingly brought to light the local agency of “peripheries,” that we should now not consider “peripheral” anymore. This is revisionary, valuable and has a powerful ethical imperative. But studying “reception” will always play out on a conceptually Western ground – whether of “Westernization” or the resistance against it. Limiting ourselves to the cozier parameters of studying reception eliminates the shock of facing radical alterity and “incomparability.” This is understandable. Isn’t it less daunting to study reception than to take the risk to devise never-perfectly-fitting and always-open-to-criticism comparisons? To study genealogical connections we typically need fewer languages (one can comfortably do “postcolonial theory” and “world literature” with serviceable English or French skills only), less competence in totally different cultural traditions or life experiences far from home, and can drastically reduce the anxiety over taking the intellectual quantum leap, not to say leap of faith, that any non-genealogical, horizontal comparative work demands.

Comparisons of premodern worlds might seem temporally less adjacent to contemporary issues. But methodologically the comparative study of these worlds promise to fulfill urgent epistemological and ethical imperatives for the present and future: we learn how to empathize differently (beyond the potentially paralyzing model of, despite all nuancing, perpetrators and victims in postcolonial studies), and how to cope with true alterity, confronting intellectual, religious, social, literary worlds that pique and unsettle our conceptual habits, allowing us to thoroughly globalize our approaches instead of short-cutting them again and again through the colonial and post-colonial feedback loop of Western cultural parameters.

Comparison is rebellious and radical. It is ethically agnostic, or actually ambivalent, as it can be used as a tool for hegemonic control, but also as a grand, revisionary equalizer. We can tap its revisionary potential particularly through premodern worlds. This form of comparatism shares its ethical purpose with postcolonial studies, but accomplishes its goal through the lens of the pre-colonial. It opens our eyes to radically different cultural realities and truths that can help us to thoroughly “globalize” and thereby invigorate our current humanities disciplines.

3.4 Practice “Conceptual Worlding” and Metageographical Critique!

Opening the canon and archive of “world literature” has been a great achievement of world literature pedagogy over the past couple of decades, as traceable in the three largest anglophone world literature anthologies for college classroom use: The Norton Anthology of World Literature, The Longman Anthology of World Literature, and The Bedford Anthology of World Literature. In its first incarnation of The Norton Anthology of World Literature – The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces of 1956 – the Western canon was still dominant. Since the 1990s in particular the canon of what counts as “world literature” has greatly expanded, from, for East Asia, China and Japan to, finally by 2012, smaller East literatures, such as Korean, and Vietnamese.⁵ How can we balance the expansion of the globalizing canon from the world’s traditions with the desire to retain the strongest representation of beloved European classics? And how do we get from archival expansion – “more stuff” – to true conceptual cross-pollination and innovation – “new methods”?

Respecting and extending the right of all men and women to philosophy also supposes […] the appropriation but also the surpassing of languages that […] are called foundational or originary for philosophy, that is, the Greek, Latin, German, or Arabic languages. Philosophy should be practiced, according to paths that are not simply anamnesic, in languages that are without filiational relation with these roots.

Derrida 12

Derrida advocates here – at least in theory, though unfortunately never in his own practice – for a form of globalizing philosophy, where other languages and thought traditions serve as source for new kinds of philosophizing. And I agree that thinking new, living new, and promoting more global equality among countries, cultures, and communities requires other languages and worlds than Global English and Euro-americanism (or “postcolonial immigrant multiculturalism”). But with the pervasive impact of the West, is there even any language left “without filiational relation” to the originary languages of Western philosophy? Is there any space left where we can transcend anamnesis? How can we hope for conceptual innovation from languages that have long been without a genealogical relation to European languages and with their own strong thought traditions, but that have been thoroughly Westernized in modern times? Let’s consider again the case of East Asia. Much of the vocabulary of modern East Asian languages consists today of neologisms acquired since the 19th century through the translation of Western concepts: “philosophy,” “culture,” “society,” “university,” “democracy,” “nation,” “infection,” “cosmology” etc. Today native speakers don’t typically realize that 哲學 (Chinese: zhexue; Japanese: tetsugaku; Korean: ch’ŏrhak; Vietnamese: triết học) is a foreign term introduced more than a century ago to translate the Western concept and phenomenon of “philosophy.” Since this concept exists now as a nativized neologism in the modern East Asian languages, people project the Western idea of “philosophy” back onto their own history – imposing a radically foreign framework that severely warps their own traditions. Sadly, we cannot solve this problem with the best intentions and fiercest purpose of resistance to Eurocentrism. This is the force of history – of European and Japanese colonialism and Western economic and cultural hegemony since the nineteenth century – of history as it happened. And we cannot turn the clocks of history back.

But we can foster awareness of this linguistic “colonization” that hampers any attempt to write about the premodern past in modern Chinese, Japanese or Korean. We can aim to recover premodern non-Western “humanities,” knowledge cultures, such as the traditional world of letters and literature (文) in Japan and East Asia (Kōno, Denecke et al.). And we can embrace the reality as an invitation to experimenting with our ingrained conceptual biases in English. Consider this patchwork of sentences, with Western-inspired neologisms in italics. Over the past century China has acquired a “philosophy,” to stand on a par with Greece, the cradle of Western “civilization,” by declaring its masters, such as Confucius, Laozi, Zhuangzi “philosophers.” Some “Societies” in East Asia have been transformed into “Democracies” since the Second World War. East Asia is now dotted with “Universities” educating “the People” of their respective “Nations,” among other things in “National Literature” and “National History.” We constantly need to think against this “conceptual screen,” a formidable mosaic of glass ceilings of sorts when trying to understand, and speak or write about, traditional East Asia. Antonio Gramsci and subaltern studies have called attention to underprivileged social classes – colonial subjects, women, children – and promised liberation for individuals, groups, entire regions. Here we have a strangely internalized, disembodied form of the “subaltern”: it is not a person or territory, but the premodern past of non-Western cultures. To riff on Gayatri Spivak’s well-known article “Can the subaltern speak?”: “Can premodern China ‘speak’?.” And how can we talk about it in any language, including modern Chinese, without colonizing its past – since it and we have lost our voice about it through drastic linguistic Westernization?

Here comes the inverse thought experiment, as ridiculous as tragic: imagine that Japan or China had colonized Europe aggressively over the past couple of centuries and that a large part of modern vocabulary of European languages now consisted of Chinese-inspired neologisms coined through translations of Chinese canonical and scholarly texts. Imagine now the platitudes that would appear in an imaginary “History of European philosophy” textbook, overlaid with an East Asian conceptual screen, in our modern, now strongly Sinicized European languages. We might find clichés like this: “Plato was suspicious of shi 詩 and wen 文 and believed that it should not be part of the guo 國 of zhuzi baijia 諸子百家.” Understood? Stepping back from this counterfactual history experiment, we could put this simply as “Plato was suspicious of poetry (shi) and literature (wen) and believed that it should not be part of the republic (guo) of philosophers (zhuzi baijia).” First of all, appreciate the fact that with English at least today we hardly have to face the violent imposition of recent foreign neologisms! Next, consider the conceptual gaps: in Chinese shi and wen have often been understood to depict some truthful experience of the poet – not outright “fiction” or “mimesis” in the Platonic sense. This allowed for the peculiar existence of “poet-historians” like the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu, one of Chinese most canonical poets, who chronicled the upheavals of his time in verse. Yet, in the Platonic tradition “poetry” was an “artifact” (Greek “poiesis”), something so artificial and devoid of metaphysical truth that Plato banned it from his ideal state. And how could guo, a “state,” ever map on our pride seeking the roots of democracy in the Greek city states and the ideal of the “republic”? Equally alienatingly, Chinese zhuzi baijia, literally “Masters (Literature),” refers to various early thought traditions centered around charismatic master figures (such as Confucius, or Laozi). None of these philosophical masters were interested in developing a project of a “philosophy” searching for universal metaphysical truth, as at least the Platonic tradition (and European tradition, as the Whiteheadian “footnote” to Plato) pursued it. Even just this one sentence from an imaginary reverse-virtual-history textbook should make the enormity of this problem clear.

Imagine a well-educated late 19th-century government official of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) who has slept through the twentieth century and awakens today. The drastic shift from Chinese characters to the han’gul script would be the least of surprises. But how could he make sense of the conceptual screen of Western neologisms that now overlays every single sentence? What would he feel when trying to talk in this new gibberish – about “premodern” Korea, his Chosŏn-period Korea. Excitement? Tingling novelty? Revelation? Humiliation? Rivalry? Depression? Vengefulness? These sentiments have accompanied the engagement between East Asia and the West since the late nineteenth century. Of course, we can also get more cold-blooded and sober about this. Today, as neologisms have built not just new languages, but also new institutions, education systems, and new forms of politics, scholarship, science, pop culture, marriages and everyday lives, they seem little foreign and have their own historical raison d’ être. Still, these problems are a systemic predicament for studying East Asia before the twentieth century, which needs to access the cultural space preceding the colonization of East Asian languages and societies with Western ideas and ideologies. Every time I lay my hands on the keyboard to start writing another sentence for an article or a book I feel the heavy weight of this tantalizing predicament. And I know we can only win, now, by devising detours.

When we aim to also globalize our concepts and methods, we need to first cultivate a relentless awareness of the colonization of today’s East Asian (or South Asian, or African …) languages with Western neologisms and concepts. And we need to apply this to even broader frames of reference: ideologies and world-views that impact institution building (such as humanities disciplines). Never has there been more published historical research than over the past century. Just for Europe, book production has consistently picked up since the fourteenth century; but the past half-century has seen a staggering increase (Roser). Modern mass education, with its mushrooming institution building and faculty, professional intellectuals recruited and evaluated through publication performance, has been producing a daunting output of books. Nineteenth-century historicism, with its post-classical voracity to conquer all periods and places through the lens of history, and postmodernism, with its indulgence in eclectic juxtapositions of historical sound bites, should have made us more history-conscious than ever. Yet, it is astounding how easily current geopolitics can blind us to longer-term historical patterns. While this is less evident in microhistorical studies confined to a single place or culture, which still constitute the bulk of academic output for tenure, this longue-durée amnesia becomes embarrassingly obvious in popular (mis)understanding of premodern worlds. There, geopolitical inequalities and myth-making, based on contemporary hierarchies of economic, political, and cultural power, are typically taken for granted or even exploited for academic fame or financial gain. Take “Sinophoria,” the feverish debates around the recent “rise of China (and Asia).” It is obviously not a rise – but just a come-back, after a brief break, for one of the world’s most persistent transregional hegemonic powers. More dangerous, because less obvious, is the grossly distorting geopolitics of Eurasia. Over the past few decades Eurasia has economically and politically become a “book-end continent,” framed by a mildly declining affluent Western Europe and the vertiginously growing economic powerhouse China.

These maps of the “real world” expose the ideological glass ceilings that remain hidden in scientific geospatial projection. While Europe’s and Japan’s economic power has decreased in relative terms, China has taken a gigantic leap in economic and political terms, as has South Korea. This “book-end continent” has encouraged book-end “East-West” comparisons. The blurb of a new book series on “Chinese-Western Discourse” unabashedly proclaims: “The ever-increasing interactions between the Chinese and the Western World result in fast-paced global transitions. The series has been created to capture these developments, presenting monographs and collections on the Chinese-Western Discourse in the humanities.” Where is the rest of East, South, and Central Asia? The Middle East? (And a good part of the world otherwise?) What actually is “Chinese-Western Discourse”? Is it the Platinum customers’ airport lounge, where you need the right badge? This drastic reductionism of Eurasian cultural history based on blatant geopolitics is all the more shocking, given that much of “Western” arts and sciences survived through and in dialogue with Arabic translations and scholars and that the lion’s share of the scholarly lexicon of modern East Asian languages originating in Western humanities and “Western discourse” was coined in Japan, not China.

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Figure 1

Map scaled by 1990 GDP

Citation: Journal of World Literature 6, 4 (2021) ; 10.1163/24056480-20210004

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Figure 2

Map scaled by 2015 GDP

Citation: Journal of World Literature 6, 4 (2021) ; 10.1163/24056480-20210004

The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live by Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford. © 2008 Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford. Published by Thames & Hudson Ltd., London, 2008 and 2010

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The fetish of “venerable civilizations” and their “splendors” is luckily gradually fading, except in populist propaganda. Over the past decades China historians have shown that the steppe peoples on China’s Northern frontier might have done more for Chinese history than Chinese civilization has done for these supposed “barbarians.”⁶ Moreover, weak, dysfunctional states, obliterated and unclaimed states make for the majority of states in world history. To take just one example, the state of 渤海 (K. Parhae; Ch. Bohai; J. Bokkai) which was formidably powerful on the Eastern edge of Eurasia during the eighth through tenth centuries, falls outside the direct genealogies of extant modern Asian states. Covering parts of today’s North Korea, PRC, and Russia, both Koreans and Chinese subsume it in their broader national lineage. This remains a highly sensitive issue. In an “Atlas of the Real 9th-century World” this state would have featured prominently, dwarfing insignificant marginal Japan. Today this state is forgotten, globally, while being played up unduly as a genealogical token in contemporary East Asian politics. Whatever time period we zoom into, it should be our first priority to imagine the contemporaneous geopolitical landscape, the “Atlas of the Real World” at the time. It will probably look rather different from conventional maps in historical atlases that focus on pure spatial representation and on “civilizational centers” inspired by historical lineages of today’s world.

Parhae shows how historical lineages can be played up for geopolitical purposes, but the inverse case is equally problematic: consider the modern suppression of historical genealogies within East Asia. While Europe, despite and because of its ceaseless internecine wars, has gone through many waves of identity building since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 410, with the European Union as its most recent incarnation, East Asia’s Sinographic Sphere fell apart in the twentieth century: it now consists of modern nation states backed by strongly patriotic ideologies. While we currently have more than 500 Million “Europeans,” at least by passport, there currently are no “East Asians,” but only “Chinese,” “Japanese,” “South Koreans” etc. The European Commission declared 2018 its “European Year of Cultural Heritage” in the midst of the crisis over European values triggered by the massive stream of migrants into the Union, by Brexit, and other malaises. By contrast, awareness of a shared East Asian cultural heritage is largely suppressed by regional nationalisms and fraught with lingering emotions and ambivalence towards a millennia-old history of Chinese influence in the region and the aftermath of modern Japanese imperialism.

Comparing premodern pasts can become its own culture war of sorts, a showdown of civilizations, where the very selection of cultures for comparison already decides the game. A compelling new strategy can be “South-South” comparisons, circumventing the West, as demonstrated by Benjamin Elman’s and Sheldon Pollock’s exemplary, truly collaborative What China and India Once Were: The Pasts That May Shape the Global Future (2018).⁷ Comparisons of the giants of premodern China and India will increase and promise to illuminate inspiring sets of similarities and incomparabilities, producing concepts and questions for comparison. As a ruse of reason, this will in the end even reshape our understanding of Western cultural history.