Ekphrastic Temporality - Shaj Mathew New Literary History, Volume 52, Number 2, Spring 2021, pp. 239-260 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins ...

Ekphrastic Temporality
   Shaj Mathew

   New Literary History, Volume 52, Number 2, Spring 2021, pp. 239-260 (Article)

   Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2021.0011

       For additional information about this article
       https://muse.jhu.edu/article/802090

[ Access provided at 2 Sep 2021 14:44 GMT from University of Virginia Libraries & (Viva) ]

Ekphrastic Temporality
                                          Shaj Mathew

“N
              ot a day goes by without someone telling me that I
              look like someone,” says Akiko (Rin Takanashi), the quiet
              hero of Abbas Kiarostami’s film Like Someone in Love.1 A
college student working as a call girl, Akiko makes this observation in
the home of a retired professor, Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), as the two
contemplate a portrait in his living room instead of the reason why she’s
there. Akiko steps toward the portrait, places a pencil in her bun, and
grins. “There is a likeness,” Takashi avers. And for a moment, Akiko
and the portrait occupy the same frame. The painting, it turns out, is
not just fodder for small talk during a tryst. Chiyoji Yazaki’s Training
a Parrot (1900) is central to the film. “Prior to this work,” the profes-
sor announces, “all our oil paintings were traditional. This is the first
whose subject is Japanese, but whose style is Western.”2 Equating the
traditional with the Japanese and the modern with the Western, Takashi
ventriloquizes a view of non-Western art as the union of foreign form
and local content. In the process, he rehearses the narrative of a singular
modernity—one that begins in Europe with the dawn of capitalism and
belatedly graces the rest of the world.3
   “The young girl is teaching the parrot to speak,” Takashi says of
Training a Parrot. Akiko laughs, replying, “My grandmother used to say
that the parrot is teaching the girl to speak.”4 In this coy rejoinder lies
a topos not of this film alone but of contemporary world cinema more
broadly. In moments of cinematic ekphrasis, a painting, often a por-
trait, allegorizes the experience of uneven development. The allegory
is sometimes, but not always, coincident with the one Fredric Jameson
envisioned in “Third-World Literature in the Age of Multinational
Capitalism.”5 This essay particularizes Jameson’s theory, asserting the
compatibility of allegory and l’art pour l’art while complicating the equa-
tion of modernity with capitalism. The films in its corpus thus do not
exclusively document the arrival of capitalism in their countries, nor
do they necessarily “write back” to Europe. Challenging the notion that
“the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less
developed, the image of its own future,” they undo the divide between

New Literary History, 2021, 52: 239–260

240                                                new literary history

copy and original in the first place, casting their critical lot with Akiko’s
grandmother.6 Her reading of the portrait—which inverts the hierarchy
of trainer and parrot, metropole and periphery—in fact deepens our
understanding of the theory of multiple modernities. That theory exploits
the ability of non-Western nations to strategically appropriate seemingly
more developed peers: “I believe our tradition is all of Western culture,
and I also believe we have a right to this tradition, greater than that
which the inhabitants of one or another Western nation might have,”
Jorge Luis Borges writes in a different but exemplary context.7 This es-
say, by contrast, will insist on the simultaneity of modernity’s multiple
temporalities—not “the privilege of historic backwardness,” as Leon
Trotsky put it.8 These temporalities align less with Ernst Bloch’s notion
of the synchronicity of the nonsynchronous—which, read in context,
deems nonsynchronous elements residually backward—and more with
the nonteleological modernity theorized by critics as diverse as Dipesh
Chakrabarty and Kathleen Davis.9
   The marriage of painting and cinema generates a scene particularly
amenable to theorizing modernity’s unruly, nonlinear, simultaneous
temporalities. During the moment of ekphrasis, the painting—ostensibly
the spatial art par excellence—introduces multiple temporalities into
the film, given the chasm that separates the time and place of the art
from the time and place of the film. (Consider, for example, how the
spirit of the nineteenth-century Meiji Restoration enters Like Someone
in Love’s contemporary Tokyo via Yazaki’s Training a Parrot.) Ekphrastic
temporalities are multiple and heterogeneous, but—run amok—can
become reversible, surreal, and nonsecular as well. “These ‘other’ times,”
Partha Chatterjee writes, “are not mere survivals of a pre-modern past:
they are new products of the encounter with modernity itself.”10 The
multiple coeval temporalities of the ekphrastic moment analogize, in
turn, the multiple coeval temporalities of global modernity. This scene of
simultaneity is realized not through the atemporal plane of synchronic
analysis but rather through the multiple temporalities of lived allegory.11
While critics such as Pheng Cheah have asked how multiple modernities
theory “can generate something within itself that tears the continuity
of time apart and brings about the pluralization of temporalities,” the
allegorical artwork achieves just that.12 This article thus makes the case
for multiple simultaneous temporalities that transcend linear accounts
of modernization, which invariably condemn non-Western nations to
belatedness. Instead—when Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love gestures
to fin-de-siècle Japanese modernism and his Certified Copy (2010) alights
on a series of Madonnas, when Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Red
(1994) lingers on a ballet painting, when Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter

ekphrastic temporality                                                  241

Sleep (2014) opens the context of nineteenth-century Russia, and when
Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000) talks to a Monet that is addressed, in turn,
by a Manet—each film contests the singular story of modernity it ap-
pears to dramatize.
   These films, integrating painter and painting into their plots, ratify
the notion that the world becomes modern only after it becomes pic-
ture.13 They also differ from an earlier generation of ekphrastic cinema
that yokes scenes of portraiture to violent plots that pit life against art.
Think Jean Seberg and Anna Karina styling themselves after portraits
in Breathless (1960) and Vivre sa vie (1962); the mysterious painting of
Last Year at Marienbad (1961) (“you followed me here so that I could
show you that picture”); Vertigo’s (1958) iconic museum scene; the many
adaptations of The Picture of Dorian Gray; L’avventura’s (1960) baroque art;
or the spectral Portrait of Jennie (1948).14 These earlier concerns about
the eternal contest between art and life—concisely expressed in Edgar
Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” (1842), which is literally read out loud
in Vivre sa vie, by the director Jean-Luc Godard, no less—hew closer to
those of the bildungsroman and the künstlerroman. That is, they are
more interested in individual rather than national development. When
critics connect those two orders of bildung, they tend to lapse into a
rhetoric of belatedness: “the figure of youth,” Jed Esty writes, “seems to
symbolize the dilated/stunted adolescence of a never-quite-modernized
periphery.”15 By contrast, the films treated here address the cross-cultural
East-West encounter as narrated from the point of view of the developing
world. For this reason, the analysis excludes any number of interartistic
moments in Western film that scholars such as Brigitte Peucker have
extensively studied.16
   The ekphrastic cinema of uneven development represents the in-
dependent but convergent evolution of a topos across cultures. But
agency for these filmmakers lies on a spectrum. Some of these films
satirize communities that parrot Western culture; some screen more
sophisticated attempts at cultural hybridity; still others fashion networks
that omit the category of the West altogether. Yi Yi and Winter Sleep, for
example, describe the perils of superficial modernization. A character
in Yang’s satire of the Taiwanese bourgeoise looks to a painting by
Monet right before he ambiguously passes out in the shower. It is not
trivial that the painting, The Studio Boat (1876), is a work of modernism
that depicts the very desire to escape modernity.17 Likewise, in Ceylan’s
Anatolian countryside, Russian realist portraits by Ilya Glazunov activate
a non-Western solidarity between two former empires now struggling to
shed the labels of developing or semideveloped. Meanwhile, Kieślowski
channels his interest in uneven development more abstractly in Three

242                                                 new literary history

Colors: Red, contesting modernity’s association with progress by consis-
tently affirming the determinism of chance: a man who owns a Harvey
Edwards ballerina portrait is thus destined to meet one such dancer by
the end of the film. In each of these cases, the insertion of the painting
momentarily pauses the narrative, echoing, though ultimately transcend-
ing, Murray Krieger’s definition of ekphrasis as a desire to still time.18
Yet these moments never quite avail themselves of cinema’s unique af-
fordances: in each, the camera alights on the painting and its beholder
and moves on. It is possible to distinguish films in this genre, then, by
the extent to which they exploit the full potential of the medium.
   Kiarostami, unique among his peers, achieves the synthesis of cinema
and painting that André Bazin envisioned: “The role of cinema here
is not that of a servant nor is it to betray the painting . . . The film of
a painting is an aesthetic symbiosis of screen and painting, as is the
lichen of the algae and mushroom.”19 Splicing shots of the beholder
of the work and the work itself, Like Someone in Love and Certified Copy
capture not only the act of looking at and describing an art object but
its interpretation. Main characters in these films—both of them critics,
not incidentally—validate Simon Goldhill’s view that ekphrasis, far from
being concerned with the art object, is in fact “designed to produce a
viewing subject.”20 This view also justifies, in part, the use of the term
ekphrasis to describe films that only depict the painting for a matter
of moments—the painting itself is not the point. Working within this
critical tradition, John Hollander distinguishes notional ekphrasis, which
has no real-life referent, from mimetic ekphrasis, which does.21 Mimetic
ekphrasis does not necessarily curtail the interpretive imagination, but
it offers the viewing subject the ability to compare the actual object with
its description. Cinematic ekphrasis is a descendant of mimetic ekph-
rasis. If the latter, per James Heffernan’s definition, remains “the verbal
representation of graphic representation,” cinematic ekphrasis is distinguished
by the simultaneity of these forms of representation: the film viewer
observes the art object, its interpreter, and its interpretation more or
less at once.22 The operative framework is no longer Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing’s association of time with narrative and space with art but rather
their co-implication in cinema.23
   While this essay broaches the concept of cinematic ekphrasis, it is
ultimately more interested in what intermedial encounters say about
the world. In other words, it harnesses the synecdochal potential of
ekphrasis.24 Nested within these films are not just other works of art but
forms of relation spanning the international film circuit and the specter
of uneven development. The local particularities of these filmmakers
cannot be reduced to global frameworks, but the approach considers

ekphrastic temporality                                                  243

the extent to which the works themselves—even those seemingly rooted
in a single culture—have cosmopolitan plots or are indeed “born trans-
lated.”25 In fact, the anxieties laden in the encounter between painting
and cinema allegorize an individual non-Western film’s anticipation of
its global reception; the situation of the non-Western filmmaker in the
world system; and, most expansively, the competing demands on a non-
Western nation to reconcile indigeneity with modernity. These initial
claims would seem to track Jameson’s theory of allegory into the context
of ekphrastic cinema, and to some extent that is true. But Kiarostami’s
films, the focus of the analysis to come, do not merely reflect the real-
ity of uneven development. They subtly intervene in the worlds they
screen, imagining visions of modernity that avoid the alternate pitfalls
of Eurocentrism and nationalism. Cinematic ekphrasis, filmed through
the lens of a self-professed apolitical auteur, thus becomes both a pro-
grammatic statement of how to be modern and an immanent critique
of that very desire.
   This topos, to be clear, owes its explanatory power to the question
of time. As moments of ekphrasis insert multiple temporalities into
the film, they analogize the multiple temporalities of modernity itself.
While Benedict Anderson once theorized the nation via Walter Benja-
min’s notion of homogeneous empty time, this essay suggests restoring
the cinema, the nation, and the world to their primordial temporal
heterogeneity. (Benjamin in fact glorifies heterogeneous time in the
very essay Anderson cites.26) Some of these heterogeneous temporalities
are surreal and reversible, while others are nonsecular and nonteleo-
logical. Taken together, they refute the developmentalist conception of
history that severs the modern West from the belated rest. Thus, when
a nation is said to have revolted against modernity, as Kiarostami’s Iran
was said to have done in 1979, precisely nothing of the sort has trans-
pired. Moments of ekphrastic temporality instead allegorize a portrait
of global modernity in which any given nation contains any number of
temporalities at any given time. The literal and figurative world picture
they illuminate explains why even the most progressive of nations can
frequently seem to go backward.

            Like Someone in Love: Problem Statement

   “Prior to this work, all our oil paintings were traditional. This is the
first whose subject is Japanese, but whose style is Western. That’s why it’s
special.” Like Someone in Love turns on two deliberate errors contained
in Takashi’s ekphrastic moment. The first is factual. While most critics

244                                                      new literary history

Fig. 1. The Morettian Moment (35”) in Like Someone in Love by Abbas Kiarostami
© 2012 MK2 – Eurospace.

have taken Takashi’s description at face value, ironically in support
of arguments about truth and deception, Yazaki’s Training a Parrot is
not, in fact, the first example of a “Westernized” painting in Japan.27
The work is held today in the collection of the Geidai Museum of the
Tokyo University of the Arts, but it is seldom discussed in the critical
literature on modern Japanese painting. (Circuitously, most inquiries
into the painting refer back to the film.) In fact, it would be difficult to

ekphrastic temporality                                                  245

identify a single painting as the “first” example of East-West synthesis in
Japan, given the heady atmosphere surrounding yōga painting in the
nineteenth century. As early as 1880, artists were studying in depart-
ments of oil painting established in Kyoto.28 Landmarks of this period
include Takahashi Yuichi’s Still Life of Salmon (1877) and Kuroda Seiki’s
Morning Toilette (1893). As Japanese painters debated “the proper place
of Western-style painting . . . in a complex time of modernization and
cultural revitalization,” artistic currents flowed in the opposite direction
as well: the influence of “Japonisme” on nineteenth-century European
art is well known.29
   If there was clearly a tradition of modern Japanese art that preceded
Yazaki’s Training a Parrot by decades, why does the professor get the de-
tails wrong? Training a Parrot was likely too good for Kiarostami to pass
up for its title and content. The fact that he ignored many earlier yōga
paintings suggests he sought a work that could express the film’s experi-
ential truth rather than historical fact. He had reason: Training a Parrot
elegantly opens the film’s conversation about uneven development in
the non-Western world. And it is not accidental that this moment arrives
in the last film to be screened during Kiarostami’s life, representing the
most explicit expression of the director’s critical thought on moderniza-
tion. “We have to remember,” Hamid Dabashi writes, “that Kiarostami
is of the same generation as Jalal Al-e Ahmad, whose most influential
contribution was coining the term ‘Westoxication.’”30 If discussions of
modernity in Kiarostami’s Iran often swerved between alternate exalta-
tions of Westernization and anti-Western nationalism, his professor in Like
Someone in Love takes the former path. Indeed, Takashi’s gloss of Training
a Parrot endorses a belief that modernization lies in the application of
Western styles onto Japanese subjects. Such a theory of modernization,
not limited to Japan, still holds vast critical purchase. In a recent essay,
Pankaj Mishra traced the modernization efforts of the twentieth-century
non-Western world to René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire.31 While
Kiarostami claimed that he could have only made this film in Japan—“I
couldn’t find people like the professor anywhere else”—he also acknowl-
edged a shared tension between the traditional and the modern in both
Iran and Japan.32 Iran offered Kiarostami a setting in which he could
test the generalizability of the experience of modernity across cultures.
   The advance of capital across borders is one way to tell this story. In
this narrative, modernity is singularly identified with Western capitalism,
which creates legions of global imitators as it diffuses into the non-West-
ern world. As a result, Jameson writes, “in globalization we are confronted,
not by difference but by identity, by a world of standardization and a
domination by multinational capitalism to which no traditionalisms, ‘local

246                                                new literary history

cultures,’ ‘alternate modernities,’ ‘critical regionalisms,’ or multicultural
variety can offer alternatives.”33 And so countries like Iran and Japan—
former empires that were never colonized—nonetheless occupy in this
schema the role of imitative parrot. Given the hierarchies that underpin
this narrative’s “‘first in Europe, then elsewhere’ structure of global
historical time,” the discourse surrounding postcolonial, non-Western,
or uneven modernities has been characterized perhaps unsurprisingly
by anxieties about mimicry, belatedness, or lack.34 As Octavio Paz put
it in his 1990 Nobel Lecture, “For us, as Spanish Americans, the real
present was not in our own countries: it was the time lived by others, by
the English, the French and the Germans. . . . We had to go and look
for it and bring it back home.”35 Some twenty-five years later, this theme
would be echoed in Orhan Pamuk’s own address before the Swedish
Academy: “As for my place in the world—in life, as in literature, my basic
feeling was that I was ‘not in the centre’. In the centre of the world,
there was a life richer and more exciting than our own, and with all of
Istanbul, all of Turkey, I was outside it.”36 These writers, lamenting their
temporal and geographic distance from modernity, might be surprised
to find similar sentiments in Friedrich Nietzsche: “We dwell even today
in a carelessly inaccurate copy of French convention . . . take a stroll
through a German city—compared with the distinct national qualities
displayed in foreign cities, all the conventions here are negative ones,
everything is colourless, worn out, badly copied, negligent.”37 Nietzsche’s
anxiety was itself an expression of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
theories of Kultur, which “can be explained to a considerable extent as
an ideological expression of, or reaction to, Germany’s political, social
and economic backwardness in comparison with France and England.”38
   The global specter of­­belatedness has been well documented by schol-
ars, writers, and political actors of East and South East Asia (Anderson);
South Asia (Chakrabarty); Russia (Trotsky); Latin America (Domingo
Sarmiento); the Middle East (Jale Parla); Greece (Gregory Jusdanis);
Africa (Achille Mbembe); the indigenous Americas (Mark Rifkin); as
well as by Johannes Fabian, who argued that the entire discipline of
anthropology denied coevalness to non-Western objects in order to
study (and colonize) them.39 While Marshall Berman once argued for
the salutary qualities of “the modernism of underdevelopment”—“the
bizarre reality from which this modernism grows . . . infuse[s] it with
a desperate incandescence that Western modernism, so much more at
home in its world, can rarely hope to match”—his claim reinscribes the
very belatedness paradigm that this article seeks to trouble.40
   Training a Parrot activates these global anxieties about untimeliness in
the capitalist story of modernity. Takashi’s acceptance of this narrative

ekphrastic temporality                                                  247

at face value constitutes the conceptual error that follows his factual
one. Describing the painting as the marriage of foreign form and local
content, Takashi gives voice to Franco Moretti’s account of the non-
Western artwork’s genesis. “For me,” Moretti clarifies, “it’s more of a
triangle: foreign form, local material—and local form.”41 The view of the
non-Western artwork as derivative of an originary Western form is not
uncommon, and so the film is surely addressing an increasingly contested
critical consensus, rather than Moretti himself. But Like Someone in Love
critiques the viewpoints of Moretti and Takashi as much as it endorses
them. Far from exemplifying “local material,” the film advertises its
global composition at every level: it was directed by an Iranian, financed
in France, and shot in Japan, in Japanese, with Japanese actors. Its title
comes from an Ella Fitzgerald song. Perhaps the greatest evidence of its
cosmopolitanism arrives in the DVD’s behind-the-scenes material, where
Kiarostami instructs his actors through a remarkable Persian-Japanese
interpreter. The film’s byzantine font of influences refuses the simplistic
oppositions of the foreign form/local content/local form triangulation.
“Kiarostami always stops short of any culture and thus celebrates the
pre-cultural alterity of reality,” Dabashi writes.42
   Filming in Japan was not just an opportunity for Kiarostami to express
“certain cinephilic affections” (i.e. long-takes in the style of Kenji Mizo-
guchi).43 Rather, it was a chance to attune his audience to the question
of modernity. The ekphrastic moment shines light on the realities of
uneven development, exposing the viewer to the thinking behind a
mimicry-driven conception of modernization theory—as well as to the
attendant feelings of belatedness it spawns. Here is where the cinematic
ekphrasis becomes less about representation and more about interpreta-
tion. “Making a film in Italy or Japan, an unknown country, in a language
he doesn’t speak,” for Nico Baumbach, “heightens in a new way the sense
of the filmmaker as spectator, which in turn makes the audience more
like creators, placed in a similar relationship of discovery as the film-
maker.”44 This connection between director and audience does not seek
to agitate in the Brechtian manner of Third Cinema, but nonetheless re-
mains deeply political in its inculcation of a consciousness of a nonlinear
conception of modernity. What it gestures at in Japan are the multiple
simultaneous temporalities of modern experience—the interlaced times
of the Meiji Restoration and the present contained within the Training
the Parrot scene. As one historian of Japan puts it, “The introduction of
new times, then, did not automatically lead to the abolition of customary
practices. Frequently, modern technological instruments and measuring
devices even added to the popularity and longevity of traditional tempo-
ral orders, rather than making them obsolete.”45 The multiplication of

248                                                     new literary history

simultaneous times in modernity was not unique to Japan. Vanessa Ogle
has described the global transformation of time that took place during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; such a transformation
was catalyzed by “the single most important intellectual device by which
nineteenth-century observers gauged an interconnected and competitive
world”: comparison.46 The comparability of the uneven experiences of
modernity in the non-Western world is what allows Kiarostami to make
arguably his most Iranian film in Japan.

                       Certified Copy and Original

   If Like Someone in Love articulates the question of uneven development,
Certified Copy explores a potential solution to its anxieties about belated
modernity: the film, a paean to the copy, refuses to grant primacy to
those artworks or nations that supposedly achieved modernity “first.” 47
While Hans-Georg Gadamer described the ontological condition of the
portrait as one of secondariness, Kiarostami’s film, shot in Italy, better
exemplifies the moral of a Sufi fable: in a painting contest, an original
will be defeated by its reflection in a mirror.48 Certified Copy follows the
reunion of a Frenchwoman only known as “she” (Juliette Binoche) and
a British critic James Miller (William Shimell). The latter is promoting
his book of art criticism, Certified Copy, and the film circles the couple’s
conversations as they drive around foothills that are both distinctly Ital-
ian and reminiscent of the Iranian countryside of The Wind Will Carry
Us (1999).
   Certified Copy folds its running conversation about the mimetic quality
of art into one about the mimetic quality of national culture. All cultures,
it argues, are constitutively derivative of one another. This belief, for one
critic, has the effect of flattening character as well as geographic space:

Certified Copy thus portrays “Englishness” as stultifying academic conceit; “French”
as neurotically self-obsessed and half-heartedly seductive; “Italian” as the some-
what clichéd beauty of art, wine and landscape; and if that cramped hatchback
in which we feel trapped for too long turns out to be German, then we have
an entire central European critique done and dusted in a carefully constructed
parade of cultural pastiche . . . In Certified Copy Kiarostami has reduced many of
European cinema’s—and indeed European art’s values—to zero, as if purpose-
fully flatlining the highs and lows we expect from filmic drama, style, beauty
and narrative.49

   The thrust of this analysis, heightened by its reference to pastiche,
situates it in the lineage of Jamesonian postmodernism. But recent

ekphrastic temporality                                                 249

critics have positioned imitation and parody outside the cultural logic
of late capitalism. Jacob Edmond even identifies them as signature fea-
tures of modernism, rather than as trademarks of the laggard nation.
Rechristening the movement’s originary motto as “make it the same,”
Edmond identifies a tradition of Russian, Chinese, and Anglophone
poetry beholden less to the original than to the copy.50 “Copying,” he
writes, “can emphasize either the sameness of each iteration—its repeti-
tion of the master copy—or its difference, as each copy is reframed by
a new medium; by a new historical, cultural, or linguistic context; or by
the encounter with competing orders of repetition.”51 Maintaining the
difference of the copy once transplanted into a new context, à la Borges’s
Pierre Menard, Edmond recognizes the differentiation that follows in-
digenization. Even if this essay were to accept Jameson’s unidirectional
model of modernity, and a new era of still greater international capitalist
homogeneity were to have flourished, those nations branded as “copies”
would still differ from the European originals due to capitalism’s new
temporal, geographic, or cultural situation. The “local cultures” that
Jameson finds wanting, in other words, would represent mutations of a
concept—not its wholesale standardization. By the time viewers realize
that the film itself is a similar-but-different “copy”—that Binoche and
Shimell are acting out roles once played by Ingrid Bergman and George
Sanders in Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy (1954)—the thesis of the
film is only reiterated.
   Certified Copy flits in and out of museums, and early on, the camera re-
gards the “Musa Polimnia.” In the museum guide’s ekphrasis, this portrait,
once thought to date to Roman times, was in fact an eighteenth-century
forgery. Because it was thought to be an original for two centuries, the
museum deemed it an “original copy” worth preserving, even after the
“real original” was subsequently discovered in Naples. This reading—like
Takashi’s description of Training a Parrot—is, however, a fiction. There
was no “original” painting on which the “Musa Polimnia” was based;
the portrait was inspired, more accurately, by two frescoes in Hercula-
neum from an uncertain period.52 It was made in the first half of the
sixteenth-century—not the eighteenth, as the guide instructs. And the
painting is today housed in the Ertruscan Academy in Cortona, not in
Tuscany.53 For Kiarostami, however, the truth of the lie is always more
important: Polimnia is, among other things, the muse of pantomime.
More importantly for the film, this scene alerts viewers to the fact that
the question of time will underpin the question of originality. If Like
Someone in Love shows how the painting inserts multiple temporalities
into a scene, Certified Copy asks what happens if the time of the artwork
that does so is unstable or unknown.

250                                              new literary history

   More on that in a moment.
   Most criticism has swirled around the film’s legal riddle: is the pair
married? At the start of the film, they appear to have just met; by the
halfway mark, they refer to a shared past whose specificity and depth
would be impossible for a new couple. Many have proposed that the
two simply begin to improvise a fictional past as they go—the game of
love. In an interview in 2012, Kiarostami, ever the poet of misdirection,
provided a maddeningly straightforward answer. The film screens two
divisions of time: the beginning of their relationship, when they first
met in Tuscany, and their reunion there on their fifteen-year anniver-
sary.54 This statement is implausible for many reasons, but the director
points us in the right direction even as he distorts. The question the
film poses is not who these characters are, but when they are. When
Binoche’s character complains about her son at the thirty-four-minute
mark, she might as well be lambasting the film’s critical reception: “No
understanding of time . . . totally unaware of time.”
   The ekphrastic moment embodies the film’s temporalization. At the
seventy-two-minute mark, Binoche’s character asks another couple to
repeat their interpretation of a fountain statue. More important than
the content of the ekphrasis, however, is the identity of the actor who
provides it: Jean-Claude Carrière, the longtime screenwriter for Luis
Buñuel. Of Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), Glenn Kenny
writes, “two actresses, Angela Molina and Carole Bouquet, [are] played
the same woman, Conchita. Here, Binoche and [Shimell], while never
changing their bearings or appearances . . . seem to be incarnating dif-
ferent characters at different times, from relative strangers to estranged
husband and wife to tentative lovers to . . . what, exactly?”55 In other
words, the ekphrastic moment is the surest clue that Certified Copy enters
a surreal register. Such an aesthetic would permit unannounced shifts
between past and present—an extreme instance of modernity’s com-
pression of space and time. This hypothesis persuasively explains why
certain events from fifteen years ago are recalled in the film’s “present”
as if they had happened yesterday; it also reconciles the film’s uncanny
mood, full of mysterious doubles.
   Kiarostami’s reasons for swapping neorealism for surrealism follow
those of Buñuel. “Neorealist reality,” the latter writes in the essay “The
Cinema, Instrument of Poetry,” “is incomplete, official—reasonable,
above all else; but poetry, mystery, that which completes and extends
immediate reality, is completely absent from its productions.”56 While
Shimmel’s character literally recites a poem by the Persian modernist Me-
hdi Akhavan Sales—“The Leafless Garden,” aptly regarding the passage
of time—the surrealist poetry to which Buñuel refers becomes, in Kiar-

ekphrastic temporality                                                                251

Fig. 2. Two moments of ekphrastic temporality in Certified Copy by Abbas Kiarostami
© 2011 MK2 – Eurospace.

ostami, none other than the ekphrastic moment. The “Musa Polimnia”
scene signals the film’s interest in fluid conceptions of time, yoking its
preoccupation with authenticity—the dialectic of copy and original—to
its preoccupation with temporality. Just as the “Musa Polimnia” was once
a Roman artifact, then a Renaissance forgery, once an original, now a
copy—though not so in “real life”—so too do the film’s main characters
occupy multiple positions in time. Certified Copy thus expands on the
mode of temporalization that takes place in Like Someone in Love, where

252                                               new literary history

the presence of the painting inserts another temporality into the film.
In Certified Copy, the instability of ekphrastic interpretation—the fact
that these artworks mock attempts to locate them in time—analogizes
the temporal instability (and indeed reversibility) of its diegesis. The
film’s multiple simultaneous diegetic times, by extension, attest to the
multiple simultaneous temporalities of modernity itself.

      Rug: Toward an Immanent Critique of Modernity

   The entire collection of Renaissance painting, John Singer Sargent is
reputed to have said, is not as valuable as a single Persian carpet.57 Given
the tenuous relationship between ekphrasis and fact, this remark may not
be authentic. But Sargent’s putative pronouncement nonetheless moves
us from Certified Copy’s Italy back to the director’s native Iran. There,
Kiarostami’s short film Rug becomes this essay’s most literal instance of
cinematic ekphrasis. For six minutes, the camera drifts up, down, and
sideways across an enormous “Tree of Life” carpet made in the Kurdish
city of Bijar. On the carpet are birds, flowers, and verse. Two voices, one
male, one female, recite lines from the divans of Saadi and Farid al-Din
Attar. A violin plays classical music in the background. Birds chirp.58
   Rug, for Hamid Naficy, “is a lyrical rendition of what it means to be
Iranian . . . a dense tapestry of many classical and modern Iranian arts:
formal gardens, mystical poetry, classical music, carpet weaving, and film-
making—a true cine-poem.”59 This is true. But this essay concludes with
the film because it elegantly captures the simultaneity of multiple tempo-
ralities—twelfth- and thirteenth-century poetry; a radio program active in
the second half of the twentieth century; and Kiarostami’s contemporary
camera, among others—that evoke Persian heritage without succumbing
to nationalism. Intellectuals of Kiarostami’s era such as Jalal Al-e Ahmad
and Ali Shariati, as mentioned, frequently resorted to essentialist claims
of national superiority when confronted with their ostensible backward-
ness before the West.60 The discourse that ensued—often the product
of an engagement with Heideggerian thought—was one of authenticity:
if modernity could not be imported from Europe, it had to be wrested
from pure Iranian soil.61 Similar sentiments swept the twentieth-century
non-Western world: “the rise of nationalism meant a change of con-
sciousness so thoroughgoing that a prenationalist consciousness had
become inaccessible and thus had to be substituted for by History and
Tradition,” Benedict Anderson writes of Indonesia.62 These traditions,
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger remind us, were often invented.63
Though Kiarostami’s life corresponded to the Persian inflection of this

ekphrastic temporality                                                 253

debate, Rug valorizes neither of the solutions commonly offered during
his lifetime. If Like Someone in Love allegorizes the predicament of uneven
development, and if Certified Copy razes the hierarchies inherent in that
uneven world, Rug fashions a vision of modernity blemished neither by
Eurocentrism (modernization via Europeanization) nor by nationalism
(fetishization of a prelapsarian indigenous past).
   For the first three and a half minutes of the film, the camera clings
to the outermost edges of the long carpet. The lens floats directly above
the rug. Gliding from right to left, the camera eyes a series of miniature
trees within trees during its first lap; its second revolution moves one
panel inward, hovering over lines of mystical poetry. Once it reaches the
edge of the rug, it curves ninety degrees, and picks up the next poetic
thread. However, when it reaches the last line of poetry at the three-and-
a-half-minute mark, it abruptly starts to spin, as if shaken by what it has
read: “Freemen have no belongings,” a cypress tree whispers, explain-
ing why it has no fruit by way of Saadi.64 Adopting a mazier path, the
camera—now swaying, as if drunk—then descends upon a large yellow
bird at the top-center of the carpet, delicately wading over more birds,
grapes, and flowers to its bottom-right-hand corner, before gingerly
making its way back up the left-hand side of the carpet. During its final
ascent, the camera zooms out, revealing a cypress tree above the carpet,
a field of grass below.
   Through its whirling camerawork, Rug activates a Sufi heritage. While
there is often an unwise “temptation to see Sufism as a font of universal
explanations,” the history embedded within the film justifies this claim.65
Rug’s camera movements are set to a Roshanak voiceover from the mid--
century radio show Green Leaf (Barg-e Sabz [     ]), itself an
offshoot of the Flowers of Persian Song and Music program, otherwise
known as Golha (          ). Golha reintroduced classical Persian poetry to
the Iranian public while it aired from 1956 to 1979. Inspired by meetings
of Sufi dervishes, the much-feted program brought together critics, poets,
and musicians who recited, played, and interpreted the greatest hits of
Persian literature. Rug’s appropriation of Golha owes not to nationalist
impulses, but to the very preservationist desires that animated the pro-
gram itself. “In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, radio and television
played a growing role in bringing Western cultural productions into
Iranian homes,” Nahid Siamdoust writes. “Then, as (ironically) now, an
economic and cultural obsession with all things farangi (foreign, read
Euro-American) had a tendency to place Western goods, customs, and
values above Iranian ones.”66 As the singer Mohammed-Reza Shajarian
puts it, Golha “created a sanctuary where Persian music could survive and
flourish” amid the increasing influence of Western, Arab, and Turkish

254                                                 new literary history

music.67 It did so by mining a cross section of Persian literature’s vast
heritage. The Colorful Flowers program could feature within the same
show classical and contemporary poets—ranging from Hafez to Simin
Behbahani—without worrying about sacrificing internal consistency.68
   The Green Leaf program was specifically devoted to mystical poetry,
and Rug cannibalizes six minutes from Episode 145—yet another example
of modernist debt to the copy.69 “Each program,” writes Jane Lewisohn,
“opened with the following mystical verses (attributed to Farid al-Din
Attar): ‘Open your eyes so you may see the epiphany of the Beloved
displayed upon each wall and door. When you behold this vision, you
will declare: ‘He alone is Lord in all the land.’”70 Rug indeed begins
this way, leaving little doubt as to the numinous quality of its ekphrasis.
In addition to the film’s literal citations of Attar and Saadi, the carpet
features a yellow bird perched on the top half of the rug. This bird is
none other than a wandering Hoopoe, the talisman of Attar’s twelfth-
century Sufi allegory, The Conference of the Birds.
   If Rug contains a Sufi subtext, it must by extension contain a nonsecular
temporality. Such a temporality would turn on the notion of an eternal
time that exists outside of time. A Hafez lyric concisely expresses this view:
“the adventure between me and my beloved has no end / that which
has no beginning cannot have an end.”71 Alongside the present (Kiar-
ostami’s camera), mid-to-late twentieth century (the Golha program),
and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Sufi poetry), there flows in
Rug a timeless temporality unbeholden to homogeneous empty chro-
nology. The fact that a nonsecular temporality exists within a director’s
oeuvre that routinely esteems the finite pleasures of this life suggests
not contradiction but temporal heterogeneity. Just as Roshanak and
the unidentified male voice appear to converse dialogically, alternately
soliloquizing lines of mystical poetry composed in different centuries,
so too do these heterogeneous temporalities of modernity intermingle.
Thus, while Minoo Moallem has described how Rug disrupts the teleology
of Orientalist documentary, challenging its “investment in depicting the
carpet as an exchange value,” the film’s critique of teleology arguably
operates on a far grander scale.72 Activated by the space of the carpet,
the film’s secular and nonsecular temporalities suggest that moderniza-
tion is not reducible to secularization.
   The ekphrastic critique of teleology is, of course, as old as the Aeneid.
“[Aeneas’s] shield tells us of aspects of life that are outside of time’s
march in the sense that they mirror changelessness in human nature,”
Michael Putnam writes, identifying within the epic a notion of circular
time.73 Yet as this essay has suggested, Kiarostami’s films both document
and resist the specter of uneven development through the domain of

ekphrastic temporality                                                              255

Fig. 3. Sufi representations of ekphrastic temporality in Abbas Kiarostami’s Rug.
© 2007 Farabi Cinema Foundation

ekphrastic temporality. These temporalities are multiple and heteroge-
neous (Like Someone in Love); surreal and reversible (Certified Copy); and
nonsecular and nonteleological (Rug). Each film showcases a particular
element, but these features are often copresent—another instance of
the metaleptic continuity of Kiarostami’s cinema. Commingling present,
past, and future, these films collectively mystify time. Their rebuke of
the homogeneous empty chronology of modernity is apparent in the
daily realities they screen: look no further than the way that apples and
cans zig-zag through neighborhoods for minutes at a time in Close Up
and The Wind Will Carry Us. Kiarostami’s poetics of digression parallel
the nonlinear trajectory that Iran has traversed in the twentieth century:
once home to a US-backed monarchy, then to years of war and revolu-
tion, the country is now a theocratic nuclear state. The contradictions
dramatized in Kiarostami’s oeuvre attest less to the coexistence of non-
modern and modern elements than to the simultaneity of modernity’s
heterogeneous temporalities. Viscous, overlapping, reversible, and un-
stable, the times of this cinema—proleptic, reflective—resist the logic
of progress via the desacralized altar of art. In this way, these paintings,
statues, and rugs—themselves older, slower forms—achieve a temporal
effect that is distinct from the stillness of the cinematic photograph;
they do not petrify time but multiply it.74 If this sounds familiar, it may
be that a variant of ekphrastic temporality was first theorized, avant la
lettre, by Benjamin.75 The painting he looked at was by Paul Klee.

                                                            Trinity University

               This essay was awarded the 2020 Ralph Cohen Prize.

256                                                             new literary history

                                            NOTES

Special thanks to Claris Mathew, Marta Figlerowicz, Dudley Andrew, Kyle Hutzler, and Car-
los Alonso Nugent for reading earlier drafts of this essay, and to Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen
and Farkhondeh Shayesteh for sharing with me their knowledge of cinema and poetry.
1 Like Someone in Love, directed by Abbas Kiarostami (MK2: Eurospace, 2012), DVD.
2 Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000): 65. I
have slightly modified the film’s subtitles for accuracy. I am grateful to Nina Farizova for
translations from the Japanese.
3 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London:
Verso, 2002).
4 Like Someone in Love.
5 Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social
Text, no. 15 (1986): 65–88. Hamid Naficy, describing the reception of Iranian cinema,
typifies most treatments of Jameson’s essay: “They were not national ‘autoethnographies’
or national ‘allegories,’ as described by Mary Louise Pratt (1991) and Fredric Jameson
(1986), respectively, or ‘documentaries’ about Muslim societies, as literature and films of
the global south is often construed to be. Rather, they were works of art, driven by auteur-
ist ambitions and aesthetics and by modernist and postmodernist individual subjectivity
at multiple levels—authorial, diegetic, and spectatorial.” The thrust of this criticism is
that allegory reduces the film to anthropology, evidence, or information for the Western
viewer, stripping it of aesthetic value. But allegory and aesthetics are not mutually exclu-
sive. This critique is also invalidated by the fact that Naficy directly reads both diegetic
characters and the sociological situation of the filmmaker as expressive of some feature
of modernity—that is, as allegorical of it. This essay will go on to critique Jameson, but at
this juncture it justifies its recourse to allegory by pointing out its ubiquity or even inescap-
ability. Naficy, “All Certainties Melt into Thin Air: Art-House Cinema, a ‘Postal’ Cinema,”
in A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 4, The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010 (Durham, NC:
Duke Univ. Press, 2012), 241.
6 Karl Marx, “Preface to the First German Edition of Capital,” in The Marx-Engels Reader,
ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 296. Kevin Anderson’s recuperation
of the “multilinear” (as opposed to unilinear) trajectories available in the Grundrisse still
assumes the priority of a Western model. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism,
Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2016), 154–56.
7 Jorge Luis Borges, “El escritor argentino y la tradición,” in Discusión (Buenos Aires:
Debolsillo, 2012), 164; Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E.
Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 184; Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alterna-
tive Modernities,” in Alternative Modernities, ed. Gaonkar (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press,
2001), 17; S. N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000): 1–29; and
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early
Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 735–62.
8 Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, trans. Max Eastman (London: Pluto,
1977), 27.
9 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000); Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty:
How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: Univ. of
Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its
Dialectics,” trans. Mark Ritter, New German Critique, no. 11 (1977): 22–38.
10 Partha Chatterjee, “The Nation in Heterogeneous Time,” The Indian Economic & Social
History Review 38, no. 4 (2001): 403.

ekphrastic temporality                                                                   257

11 Paul de Man has demonstrated the temporality of allegory, preferred here to the
spatial atemporality of conjunctural analysis. See de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,”
in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: Univ.
of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–228; and Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and
Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2011), 27–28.
12 Pheng Cheah, What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham,
NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2016), 208.
13 Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans.
Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Tomás
Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) also features a museum scene in which
paintings by Ángel Acosta León are conscripted into a doomed Pygmalion plot.
14 Last Year at Marienbad, directed by Alain Resnais (Criterion Collection, 2009), DVD.
15 Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (Ox-
ford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 7.
16 Brigitte Peucker, Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
Univ. Press, 2019); and Anne Hollander, Moving Pictures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1991).
17 That paradox by no means “disqualifies” his culture from modernity. Harry Harootu-
nian writes, “These modernists against modernity, as Raymond Williams has called them,
sought in historical representations a refuge against the alienating effects of everyday
modern life and thus attributed to art and culture, in the broadest sense, absolute value.”
Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), xxi. I acknowledge Anni Shen for first pointing
out this moment in Yi Yi.
18 Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1992).
19 André Bazin, “Painting and Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 2005), 1:168.
20 Simon Goldhill, “What Is Ekphrasis For?” Classical Philology 102, no. 1 (2007): 2.
21 John Hollander, “The Poetics of Ekphrasis,” Word & Image 4, no. 1 (1988): 209–19.
22 James Heffernan, “Ekphrasis and Representation,” New Literary History 22, no. 2
(1991): 299; and Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004). Heffernan’s definitions are more productively
abstracted than Leo Spitzer’s definition of ekphrasis as “the description of an objet d’art
by the medium of the word.” René Wellek is more pessimistic about the possibility of
ekphrastic realization, advocating for medium specificity. See Spitzer, “The ‘Ode on a
Grecian Urn,’ or Content vs. Metagrammar,” Comparative Literature 7, no. 3 (1955): 218;
and Wellek, “The Parallelism Between Literature and the Arts,” English Institute Annual
1941 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1942), 29–63.
23 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans.
Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984), 78.
24 I take the idea of ekphrasis as synecdoche from Michael Putnam, for whom an in-
dividual ekphrasis contains, in parvo, the entire work. W. J. T. Mitchell, in his survey of
ekphrastic hope, fear, and indifference, makes the case for the allegorical function of
ekphrasis in which anxieties about intermediality analogize anxieties about intersubjectiv-
ity: “ekphrastic hope and fear express our anxieties about merging with others.” Putnam,
Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1998); W. J.
T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Repre-
sentation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), 163.
25 Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2015).

258                                                            new literary history

26 Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities invokes Walter Benjamin’s account of the
homogeneous empty time of modernity, even though Benjamin seeks to blow up that
very homogeneous empty chronology in favor of a revolutionary messianic historicism
in the “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” For a critique of Anderson’s appropriation
of Benjamin, see John Kelly, “Time and the Global: Against the Homogeneous, Empty
Communities in Contemporary Social Theory,” Development and Change 29, no. 4 (1998):
839–71; and Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of National-
ism (London: Verso, 2006).
27 Mathew Abbott, Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ.
Press, 2016), 133. I thank Alicia Volk for confirming these details about the history of
modern Japanese art.
28 John Clark, “Yōga in Japan: Model or Exception? Modernity in Japanese Art 1850s-
1940s: An International Comparison,” Art History 18, no. 2 (1995): 258.
29 Ayako Ono, Japonisme in Britain (London: Routledge, 2013); and Alice Tseng, “Ku-
roda Seiki’s ‘Morning Toilette’ on Exhibition in Modern Kyoto,” The Art Bulletin 90, no.
3 (2008): 417.
30 Hamid Dabashi, Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future (London: Verso,
2001), 257.
31 Pankaj Mishra, “The Entrapments of Top-Down Modernity,” Raritan 36, no. 2 (2016):
15–49.
32 Kiarostami quoted in Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami
(Champaign: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2018), 151.
33 Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (London: Verso, 2019), 26.
34 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 7.
35 Octavio Paz, “In Search of the Present,” Nobel Lecture, December 1990, http://www.
nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-lecture.html. See also Wole
Soyinka, “This Past Must Address Its Present,” Nobel Lecture, December 1986, http://
www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1986/soyinka-lecture.html
36 Orhan Pamuk, “My Father’s Suitcase,” Nobel Lecture, December 2006, https://www.
nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2006/pamuk-lecture_en.html.
37 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely
Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 80.
38 Alfred Mayer, “Historical Notes on Ideological Aspects of the Concept of Culture in
Germany and Russia,” Appendix A to A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhorn, Culture: A Critical
Review of Concepts and Definitions. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology
and Ethnology, Harvard University 47, no. 1 (1952): 207–8. See also Carlos J. Alonso, The
Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1990), 28.
39 Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1991); Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: National-
ism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998); Domingo Sarmiento, Facundo: or,
Civilization and Barbarism, trans. Mary Mann (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998); Jale Parla,
Babalar ve Oğullar (İstanbul: İletişim, 1990); Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 2001); Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology
Makes its Object (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2002); and Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler
Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press,
2017).
40 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York:
Penguin, 1982), 232.
41 Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 65.
42 Dabashi, Close Up, 63.