This special session proposes to examine “literary dubbing” as a conceptual intervention in world literature debates. As formulated by Ben Tran, literary dubbing is the act of translation when an author represents characters’ speech and thought from an implied language, within the diegetic frame, to the language of representation, or the reader’s language. This form of authorial translation derives from the doubling of language—or dubbing—in film, which synchronizes linguistic discrepancies into a naturalized corporeal performance assimilable to a target audience. Heeding Barbara Fuchs’s call to reflect on the presidential theme “Multilingual US,” this session interrogates Anglophone literature’s hegemony in representing the multilingualism of non-English speakers within a monolingual frame.

The stakes of examining literary dubbing recall Aamir Mufti’s critique of global English as a “vanishing mediator” of cultural exchange in the global literary market in Forget English! (2018): the celebration of cross-cultural empathy enabled by world literature depends on the erasure of unfinished legacies of Anglo-American imperialism and Orientalism. While Rebecca Walkowitz’s Born Translated (2015) explores contemporary novels that anticipate translation to reach multilingual reading publics, literary dubbing describes writing that already incorporates translation to reach an English-language reading audience. Yet the recognition of literary dubbing does not simply constitute a melancholic lament for the subsumption of linguistic diversity under the homogenizing effects of global English. The session’s presentations also consider how Asian American and Anglophone writers creatively redeploy literary dubbing to undo stereotypes and denaturalize the ostensible synchrony between linguistic and perceived cultural difference within literary scenes of linguistic accommodation.

Ben Tran’s paper, “Literary Dubbing and Hollywood: Asian Americans as Linguistic Others,” delves further into the relationship between the dubbing in filmmaking and dubbing in literary representation. He analyzes recent novels that self-reflexively address the filmic translation of Asian and Asian American characters. In Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto, Tran focuses on the novel’s translator character who seeks to correct and disrupt the historiography and mainstream narratives about the Philippines. In Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, he analyzes how Hollywood’s othering of Asian characters on the silver screen is premised on, in large part, literary dubbing. Tran argues that these novels not only grapple with the effects of literary dubbing, but their experimental forms also seek to make more apparent and to undo what has been elided by literary dubbing.

In her paper “Dubbing America: Korean American Linguistic Utopianism,” Jeehyun Choi considers what happens when literary dubbing is “reversed” through an analysis of the 1930s works of the Korean American author Nak Chung Thun, whose large but hitherto unknown oeuvre has been recently donated to the University of Southern California and published for the first time in 2019 in Korea. Thun’s Korean-language works promise not only sociological and ethnographic significance but also broaden our understanding of the intimacies between early Korean America and colonial Korea. Choi traces the utopian fantasy of seamless cross-cultural communication that characterizes two of Thun’s novels, Righteous Robber and May Flower—novels that both dub 1930s California’s white middle-class society in Korean. Choi examines how Thun’s dubbing of white America leverages both anti-racist critique against the United States and anti-imperial critique against Japan, as the colonial power began to implement aggressive policies to suppress Korean language use in the late 1930s.

Cheng-Chai Chiang’s paper, “The Theatre and its Dubber,” examines British playwright David Hare’s 1975 play Fanshen (a Brechtian reworking of William Hinton’s 1966 eponymous ethnographic account of land reform during the Chinese Civil War) alongside street theater mounted by the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) that dubbed a Chinese revolutionary idiom to “raise consciousness” about gay oppression in 1970s Britain. He reconsiders the paradox of Asian American racialization—oscillating between the “model minority” and the “inassimilable alien”—in light of Brecht’s valorization of “alienation effects” in his theory of epic theatre that is based on his cultural translation (and misrecognition) of Chinese opera actor Mei Lanfang’s calculated self-exoticism as a mode of dramatic estrangement. Fanshen features an ensemble of Chinese characters but was staged with a Caucasian cast, mirroring the institutional occlusion of racial minorities in contemporaneous homophile movements. By analyzing Hare’s and GLF’s theatrical dubbing of Chinese revolutionary rhetoric, Chiang critiques postwar British multiculturalism for co-opting Brechtian aesthetics of “Asian inscrutability” while rendering the exclusion of racialized subjects invisible.

Each presentation will last 18 minutes, leaving plenty of time for discussion. Collectively, the papers offer new ways of reckoning with literary dubbing as a widespread yet undertheorized phenomenon in world literature, while also considering the myriad ways in which it doubles as experiments in deorientalizing global English and utopian sociolinguistics.