ABSTRACT
This essay uses a reading of the scene of translation in Martin Scorsese’s screen adaptation of Endō Shûsaku’s novel Silence to pose questions to area studies and comparative literature, with an eye to cross-mapping those questions to others about postwar global governance under US hegemony. Four themes are discussed in detail: (1) globalisation, or the single world born out of colonial-imperial modernity; (2) the apparatus of area and the aesthetic humanism of anthropological difference; (3) the political ontology of cultural individuation; and (4) the vexing role of silence in relation to the modern regime of translation after colonialism and the Shoah. A theoretical discussion of these four aspects is followed by a case illustration based on the institutional experience of postwar international China Studies, comparative literature and translation.
