What is literature? What does it mean to compare? These might seem like abstruse theoretical topics, but they become intensely practical when you are trying to frame, as I have been for the past several years, a history of East Asian literatures from a comparative standpoint—a commission from the International Comparative Literature Association.
Asia is home to some of the oldest continuous literary traditions in the world. Lines from the Vedas are familiar to practically any person in India, religious or not, Hindu or not; schoolchildren in China learn and can interpret verses from the Book of Songs, said to date back some 2500 years. Literary traditions like these have long been used to shape and enforce national canons, with the aim of building national pride and a sense of shared identity. But, like any canon, they exclude a great deal: minority languages, non-majority religions, foreigners, and vernacular scripts, for example. The project I am leading aims to emphasize, on the contrary, the cross-border traffic in texts: the translations, adaptations, plagiarisms, appropriations and mashups that are usually ignored in national literary histories. With a team of some thirty scholars from four continents (and counting), we will chronicle the interchanges that have criss-crossed the Asian continent, from the beginnings of writing to the sudden irruption of European profiteers around 1850.
To reflect accurately the movement of texts and ideas, we have had to define “literature” most broadly, including religious scriptures, laws, and histories as well as texts of the imagination. Peoples who came to writing quite late in their history have a role in these movements, despite difficulties in documentation, equal to the long-literate ones. The much-maligned Mongols were not merely the brutal conquerors of legend, but adapters of genius who created new contacts across Asia and Europe. What is not transferred is just as significant as what is: thus, for example, the adaptations of Indian epics like Ramayana into Tibetan contrast powerfully with the utter disinterest of the Chinese in Indian narrative, while Chinese audiences eagerly seized on Indian philosophical and religious writings and made them their own. The Alexander Romance shaped epic traditions in some forty languages, hybridizing with existing stories. The Book of Songs was recently the terrain of a dispute between Chinese and Korean nationalist historians. Though many in the field of comparative literature these days worry about whether “world literature” is a Eurocentric invention, I count on the co-authors of this multi-volume work under construction to put that worry into perspective.
Part of the project has already been realized as a single-authored book about translation and intercultural contact in premodern China that should be coming out from Princeton University Press in spring 2022: The Making of Barbarians, China in Multilingual Asia. I hope comparatists will take the time to read it. I deliberately made it short and non-technical, to address the outstanding problem that most of the people who complain about Eurocentrism do so from a basis of knowledge predominantly consisting of European texts. If it were possible to argue against “-centrism,” as such, I would.