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Pictured above: Amir Khan on the left, yours truly on the right.
Sixteen years on the streets, living and working with the people of China, Jeff
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Quick recap
The meeting covered Amir’s recent academic achievements, including a new book on Shakespeare, and his career plans at Hunan Normal University. Amir and Jeff discussed Amir’s unique approach to literary analysis, focusing on his interpretation of Hamlet. The conversation also touched on Amir’s teaching methods and his interest in English literature.
Summary
Shakespeare’s Versatility and Counterfactual Readings
Amir presented his new book, “The Death of Hamlet: A Counterfactual Reading of Shakespeare.” He argued that the text’s versatility in speaking to different cultures and intellectual approaches has led to an anxiety over the true interpretation of Shakespeare. He suggested that a counterfactual method of reading the text could transcend this issue by proposing a scenario where something that happened in the text didn’t actually happen. This approach allows for the text to be meaningful without being interpreted as having timeless universal truths. Jeff showed interest in Amir’s work and suggested that it could be applied to other texts as well.
Hamlet’s Motivations and Anomaly in the Play
Amir discussed the play Hamlet, focusing on the character’s motivations and actions. He explained how Hamlet stages a play within the play to test the truth of the ghost’s claim that his uncle, Claudius, murdered his father. However, Amir pointed out an anomaly in the play, where Hamlet incorrectly identifies the character pouring poison into the ear as the nephew of the king, leading to confusion about the truth of the ghost’s claim. He also noted that the play’s resolution is dependent on the confession of Claudius, which only the audience hears, not the characters.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Unresolved Textual Anomalies
Amir discusses his interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, focusing on a textual anomaly identified by Walter Wilson Grieg in 1917. He argues that without Claudius’s confession, which only the audience hears, the play becomes unresolved and illogical. Amir suggests this could be read as Shakespeare portending the end of English civilization rather than its rise to dominance. He connects this interpretation to the historical context of the Russian Revolution and class-based reasons for suppressing such readings. Amir also criticizes the idea of Shakespeare’s universal appeal, arguing it is primarily due to the economic and cultural dominance of English-speaking countries.
Intro
BE SURE TO GO TO THE END OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, WHERE YOU CAN FIND ALL OF AMIR’S BOOKS AND ARTICLES!
Our previous audio and visual interviews together,
The above transcript,
Live interview in Changsha, China,
Today’s show
Jeff J. Brown: Good evening, everybody. This is Jeff J. Brown, Radio Sinoland in Taiwan, China—and I only have to go about 300 kilometers to the west to see Amir Khan in Changsha, Hunan, at Hunan Normal University. Same time zone. It doesn’t happen very often these days. How are you doing, Amir?
Amir Khan: I’m great. Yeah, very happy and honored to be here, Jeff. As I’ve always said, I’m a big fan of you and your show and your work. Yes, you’re a phenomenon.
Jeff: Well, that’s boogundan. Thank you. Amir is a writer. He’s a professor at Hunan Normal University. He also has a Substack. He’s very, very active in my WeChat forum. He’s a member of the China Writers Group. We’re good friends. We’ve traveled together. We’ve spent time together in China. He’s a wonderful human being. This is not the first time he’s been on the show.
I have actually published some of his articles, and this is maybe the third or fourth interview. And it’s to introduce his new book—and I’ll just say, I have not read it, unfortunately. So I’m just going to let Amir take it and run with it, and then I’ll ask some questions along the way. So, tell us about your new book.
Amir: Oh, sure. Yes. You know, first of all, I really don’t know. I mean, reading it, it would be very kind of you, obviously, if you had, but it is really for scholars. It does get a bit convoluted and stuff. So I’m hoping—my plan today is to have a very friendly talk to introduce it in a kind of friendly manner, so that you don’t have to bother reading it anyhow. So here it is: The Death of Hamlet.
Jeff: Oh, The Death of Hamlet. What was the subtitle?
Amir: The Death of Hamlet.
Jeff: The Death of Hamlet: A Counterfactual Reading of Shakespeare. All right. And it’s available on Amazon along with all of your other books?
Amir: On Amazon, the Routledge website and stuff like that. I mean, maybe I shouldn’t push this too much, but, I mean, there may be ways to get it. Anyhow, all I’m saying is that if you buy it, I get very little royalties, so it’s not… I’m happy to share ideas in any capacity like I’m a communist; I don’t believe in… This isn’t my property. It’s for everyone.
Jeff: So tell us about Hamlet.
Amir: Okay. Now, very dramatic title: The Death of Hamlet. Yes. And what does that mean? I mean, Hamlet dies at the end of the play. But what I’m really suggesting is that the text itself—Hamlet, the imaginative life of the text is over. You know, there’s really nothing new we can say about the text. We’ve been talking about it for counterpart 400 years. And we keep trying to bring sort of new approaches to the text and time period, you know? And then after a while, we kind of… yeah, that’s kind of interesting. Let’s get something new.
And we just keep doing that over and over and over again to the point where now you have all of these approaches that you brought to the text. Which one is the so-called true one? And if they’re all true, then none of them are true. And if all of these approaches are true, why do you even need the text? So, I mean, I’m just talking about the isms, right? Like, let’s do a Marxist reading of Hamlet. Let’s do a psycho. Well, that’s not isms… psychoanalytic, feminism, well, communism, socialism, eco-criticism.
And now you have all these kinds of woke approaches. And as we were talking just briefly before, right now you have all these global approaches. Let’s see what the Chinese dramaturgical tradition can bring to Hamlet. And when I say Hamlet, I mean Shakespeare, and I kind of mean literature more broadly. But just for illustrative purposes, I’m just going to focus on Hamlet because that’s what my book is about. But there is this idea, right? Like, why do we read literature? What’s the point?
Now, the point, immediately speaking, is like because somebody like Shakespeare can give us sort of ahistorical, timeless, universal truths, you know, almost like religious truths or something that are true for all time, that are eternal. And if you spend time with the great author Shakespeare, you will come to know these truths. And that’s one reason—and one way—and one reason it’s important to read Shakespeare, to read great literature, whether it’s Shakespeare or Hamlet or whatever.
Now, in Shakespeare studies—in the professional study of Shakespeare that sort of approach thinking that Shakespeare is universal and timeless is almost hegemonic, and it’s out of fashion. You know, you can’t say that there’s one singular way to read it. There are many different cultures, many different approaches, many different. So you have to actually now under the postmodern conditions of reading literature. It’s no longer in fashion to say that there’s timeless, universal, historical truth.
Okay, so we don’t read Shakespeare for timeless, universal, historical truth. But the other thing we can do is we can bring all these approaches to Shakespeare. Okay? And that, in a sense, shows why Shakespeare is important, you know, whether it’s cultural—Chinese, like you were saying in African, Indonesian, Bali, Japanese, whatever. So that does, in a sense, show the versatility of the text Hamlet or whatever, that he can speak to all of these other cultures and all of these other approaches.
And there’s also intellectual approaches—all the isms that I mentioned. But that creates a new problem, right? Because now there’s this anxiety: well, if Shakespeare only means because if there’s a whole number of truths to why Hamlet or why Shakespeare means, isn’t there one true one? Or like is this just all of these? So now it’s like, if everybody brings an infinite number of interpretations to the text, and all of them are disciplinary-specific, which one is the true one?
I mean, so that’s kind of a new problem. So how do you solve that problem? Shakespeare, if he speaks to everything, he sort of speaks to nothing. At the same time, also, you know, there’s many like, I mean, I’m sure you’re going to see a book very soon on AI Shakespeare, whatever that means. Every time there’s a new approach happening elsewhere in some other discursive sort of scholarly community, there are some Shakespeareans who’ll go, “Hey, maybe Shakespeare has something to say about that.”
So I think in 2010, just as an example, this guy, David Hawkes, he wrote this book called Shakespeare and Economic Theory. Oh, well, that’s interesting. Okay, so maybe if you read economic theory, Shakespeare has something to say to it, or you can kind of meld the two together and, you know, bring out, create some new knowledge and publish a book or publish an article. Now, that’s interesting because after you read that book, it seems like, oh, so maybe economists would benefit from reading Shakespeare.
But no economist—no professional economist—they have enough to read, you know. Nobody in each of these specific disciplinary schools—even if it’s Freudianism, if you go study psychology or whatever, you know—you have enough actual empirical studies and papers to read; you’re not going to seriously engage with Shakespeare. And people in Shakespeare who think that you should, I mean, it’s that normative should. This is almost like an empty kind of a, you know, we say that books get published on Shakespeare all the time. They’re feeding this kind of Shakespeare industry. But the only thing that they are doing is they are saying oh all these…
Jeff: Gone, baby. Oh. Well, what happened, brother? Well, where am I?
Amir: Jeff, should I have my VPN on or off?
Jeff: Off.
Amir: Yes. Off. Okay. I’ve now turned it off.
Jeff: Yeah, I think so. All right. Let’s get back. You were on a really good roll and they said they’re feeding this kind of Shakespeare industry, and so go on.
Amir: Right. Yes. So, right. Feeding that Shakespeare industry. So you bring all these approaches to Shakespeare because you want to undermine this one universal, hegemonic truth, you know? Okay, because we want to involve many different approaches and everything like that to show how the text is very versatile and meaningful and everything like that. So in one way, you do that but in another way, you have a new crisis, which is: if… what…
And then, for example, economic theory and Shakespeare, or Freudianism and Shakespeare, or feminism in Shakespeare, or any ism, any approach to Shakespeare. Now the question is: does Shakespeare footnote the ism, or does the ism footnote Shakespeare? You see what I mean? Which one is more important? Like, if I’m studying economics, I don’t need Shakespeare, or if you’re studying Shakespeare, in order to make Shakespeare meaningful and to publish papers and publish books, I have to go read economics.
Why don’t I just go read economics? Like, why am I still reading Shakespeare? Why am I trying to put these things together? You know, so in that sense, we don’t even know why Shakespeare means. And in the sense, we’re almost embarrassed that there is this text that needs to be interpreted because we want to know once and for all what is the point of reading these texts. So that’s the kind of… I don’t know, I don’t want to be too dramatic here, but that’s the kind of crisis that scholarship about Shakespeare, even about Hamlet, is stuck in.
How do you sort of transcend this? And I guess what I’m saying in my book, The Death of Hamlet, is that, yes, bringing just another approach to Shakespeare is not profitable. Talking about Shakespeare or Hamlet as if it has some timeless, universal truth—also not profitable. But I do have one interpretation that I think is profitable, but it also means that the text could be finished and that we don’t need it anymore. So I call my book The Death of Hamlet: A Counterfactual Reading of Shakespeare.
And I make a claim that well, not like a, you know, like there is one way of looking at the text that transcends both of those questions. You know, avoids both of those—that doesn’t seek to either make it ahistorical and universal, but also at the same time isn’t just another approach, even though you could call it a counterfactual approach. And that has to do with. Now I’ll get into the text itself a bit. A particular textual anomaly in Hamlet. So how’s that so far, Jeff? That’s all making sense, right?
Jeff: Yeah, yeah, go ahead. What is the anomaly? Keep going. You’re on a roll.
Amir: Okay. Yeah, now I’m going to like kind of move into the… and maybe it will seem like, what is he talking about? But hopefully by the end, we can wrap it all up and things will make sense for everybody. Now, this is my second book of criticism on Shakespeare study. So, in my first book, I talked about Hamlet, and I noticed, and I brought… I propose sort of a counterfactual method of reading Hamlet. And all that means is you have to read the text and suppose that something that happened didn’t happen.
Yeah, I’ll get to this. Now, first of all, Hamlet—very simple text, actually. I mean, you know, very complex, but very simple plot. We all know that when Hamlet begins the play—when the play Hamlet begins, Claudius is the king of Denmark, and he has married Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, and she’s the reigning queen. Recently, according to what the court knows, the old King Hamlet, Hamlet’s father, has died, and he died because he was bitten by a scorpion while he was sleeping in his orchard.
That’s the propaganda story that’s given to everybody. But Hamlet, you know, he’s kind of… He’s not feeling good about things because his father has just died, and now his uncle is the king, you know, he’s taken over, and not him. And his mother has remarried his uncle. So Hamlet is not very happy about that. But then what happens is he’s visited by the ghost of his dead father. And his dead father says, “Everyone thinks that I died peacefully sleeping in my orchard from a scorpion bite, but that is not true.
What actually happened is my scumbag brother poured poison into my ears while I was sleeping. Pour poison into my ears—and he killed me. And then he married my queen, and now he’s ruling my kingdom. Hamlet, my son, you must avenge my death.” Okay, so Hamlet’s like, “Oh my god, okay, now the ghost has told me something. What am I going to do about this?” And he said, “First of all, I don’t trust that that ghost is really a ghost. Maybe he’s a devil or something like that.
So I have to test what he said is true. And then if what he said is true, I will do the deed and I will kill my uncle, the way the ghost—my father—my father, the ghost—told me.” So what he does is, you know, we know in Act III, he stages a play within the play. He has some actors stage a mini-representation of the crime that is told to him by the ghost. So these little actors put on a little play, and the king and queen will come and see it.
And Hamlet’s plan is, ah, the king—my uncle Claudius—will view this play, he will view his crime, and then he will be moved to… we will watch his reaction. And based on his reaction, I will know if what the ghost has told me is true. So indeed, he puts on a little… there’s a little actor-king sitting there in the orchard, and a little actor comes in and pours poison into the ears—whatever. And then, oh, the king… “Oh my God, he rises”. And then Hamlet says to Horatio, “Did you note that?” And Horatio goes, “Yes, indeed, I did.”
And then, aha, so what the ghost says is right. So now I have all the proof that I need and I will go and kill Claudius. And then after that, Claudius is at prayer. He’s just praying there. And then Hamlet sneaks up behind him and is about to kill him. And he says, “No, no, no, I can’t kill him while he’s praying, because according to Catholic tradition at the time, if you are in prayer or you’re confessing your sins, while you are killed, you will go to purgatory and not heaven.” So Hamlet says, “I’m going to wait.
I’m not going to kill him now. I don’t want to kill him while he’s praying, confessing. I’ll do it later because I want him to go to hell. I don’t want him to go to purgatory.” So he delays that Hamlet’s famous delay and everybody’s always coming up with all these theories about why he delays. Because by the time Act V comes along, Hamlet does indeed kill Claudius, and, oh my god, but many other people died at that point, and even he dies. And so it’s so tragic. Hamlet, you could have just killed him in Act III, and it would have been good.
Why did you delay? All these people died, including yourself, right? And it’s terrible. Oh my God, it’s a terrible tragedy. So that’s the play. That’s very easy. And, see, it’s very straightforward, and that’s why you watch it. Now, what’s interesting is, there is an anomaly because in Act III, when Hamlet puts on that play within the play to catch the conscience of the king, it’s actually made up of two little productions. The first production is what’s called a dumb show, which is players acting out in pantomime, almost like a little mini-play or like an abstract.
They act out in pantomime what they’re going to talk about in the speech in the play. So in the little pantomime act, with no words—nonverbal—there is a little… so you don’t really know who the king and the queen and whatever is, but there’s a little character comes along, pours poison into the ear of somebody sleeping in the orchard, and then he walks away. And at that point, Claudius doesn’t rise. What? Oh, my God. But then when it’s verbalized in the second part of the production, then you see, okay, there’s a player who pours a poison into the ears, and then the king rises.
But another curious anomaly, right? Yeah, another curious anomaly is that at that point, Hamlet tells Claudius, “Do you see that character pouring poison into the ear of the king? That character’s name is Lucianus, and that character is the nephew of the king.” Hamlet, why would you say that? Because now what Claudius sees is that he doesn’t see the past representation of a crime he supposedly committed. He sees a nephew character poisoning the king.
So he sees the possibility: Oh my God, Hamlet wants to kill me because Hamlet is my nephew and I am the king. So Hamlet doesn’t have the proof that Claudius actually. So now, if Hamlet is smart, he should have wherewithal enough to know that, oh man, you know what? The king did not rise during the dumb show. When the manner of the death is very…, it’s very peculiar, right? Pouring poison into the ears.
If Claudius had really done it, he should have risen up as soon as he saw somebody pouring poison into the ears of this character on stage, but he didn’t do that. Not only that, you said, “Oh, this is the nephew.” And then Claudius rises. So he doesn’t rise. Hamlet thinks, “I have all the proof that what the ghost has said is true,” but really, you don’t have any proof, because you screwed up the experiment. You called him the nephew character. He doesn’t rise for the reason that you think he rises.
So in that sense, Hamlet still doesn’t know that what the ghost has said is true, but he thinks he does. But actually, he never acts on it. So it’s neither here nor there. Now, what about us as viewing audience? We want to believe that Hamlet has the proof. And yeah, Hamlet, just go do it. But in the very next scene, Claudius confesses his crime. So now we know for a fact that Claudius did commit the crime that the ghost said he committed. But it’s only because of that confession. It’s not because of the play within the play.
And we have reason to believe that what the ghost said, it’s half true. Yes, my brother killed me, but he did not kill me by pouring poison into my ears because if he had killed me that way, Claudius should have risen during the dumb show. And he didn’t. So my counterfactual reading is just say, well, let’s suppose we remove the confession from the play altogether, pretend that we’ve never seen it. If we’ve never seen it, in a counterfactual way… if we’ve never seen it, then the play Hamlet is unresolved, and it makes no sense.
By the time Hamlet gets revenge, it’s almost… The play doesn’t make sense. Wait, so did Claudius do it or not? We actually have no proof at any point in the play, other than that confession, which only we hear—Hamlet doesn’t hear it, nobody else hears it. Claudius confesses in the manner of a soliloquy, which means that only we as viewing audience are privy to that information, but no one in the world of the play knows that information ever, at any point, not even Hamlet.
So that makes the play very unstable and very unresolved. And it almost doesn’t make sense. And people to this day—scholars, I mean—ignore that. They just pretend it doesn’t matter. That was a reading. I should mention noticing that anomaly was done by a scholar named Walter Wilson Greg in 1917. And since 1917, that reading has sort of been suppressed and ignored. My gambit was to sort of bring it back to light by just saying, what if we focus on this counterfactual method?
If you remove the confession, now it becomes clear as day that Greg’s reading is correct, that you can’t ignore it, that you can’t suppress it. And we have good reason to ignore the confession, because what is a confession? It’s spoken to nobody else. Nobody else in the world of the play hears it. So if you want to perceive the play, and the world of events, as Hamlet does, or anyone does in the world of the play, it makes very good sense to read counterfactually and to read as if you’ve never had that confession. And if you do that, then the play makes no sense.
Jeff: Interesting.
Amir: Right. So now the question is, how do you explain this textual anomaly, you know? What is one way to read it? And here is where I sort of build because I made that argument in my first book. But in my second book, I sort of say, well, now there is a way that that textual anomaly makes perfect sense. So, okay. Now, first of all, there’s a great paper written by Terrence Hawkes, and he’s talking about when Dover Wilson. Oh, okay. Well, he’s talking about, first, in 1917, when Greg first published that anomaly, it was read by this other English scholar named John Dover Wilson. Now note the year—1917. Wow, what else happened in 1917?
Jeff: The Russian Revolution.
Amir: Right. Excellent. Good. So now Terrence Hawkes, in this paper, tries to relate this tendency to suppress this reading of Hamlet—which is actually a correct reading—but why do we suppress it, you know? And he brings in the historical contingency of the Russian Revolution. What? Now you’re thinking, what does the Russian Revolution have anything at all to do with Hamlet and this reading by Greg? And even Greg isn’t talking about the Russian Revolution. He’s just saying, hey, what about this?
This doesn’t make any sense. But there was one critic named John Dover Wilson, and Terrence Hawkes exposes this because he goes through the diaries of John Dover Wilson. And John Dover Wilson was absolutely floored by Greg’s reading; he didn’t like it at all. He didn’t like that you’re suggesting that the greatest play in the English language, by the greatest poet in the English language, is actually anomalous, doesn’t make sense, isn’t rational, isn’t intelligible in a way.
So not only was he spooked by that, in 1917, according to his diaries—and there’s very good evidence that, you know, Terrence Hawkes presents in his paper—it’s not just that he was… John Dover Wilson was completely spooked by this reading of Hamlet. At the same time, he was also spooked by the Russian Revolution. He didn’t like it at all in the way that a lot of British bourgeois intelligentsia people, you know—they don’t like the French Revolution, they don’t like… they certainly don’t like the Russian Revolution.
And in the same way, the Russian Revolution threatened, obviously, John Dover Wilson’s class position because this is the rising of the underclasses. Now could one reason be why we’re denying this very, you know—it’s not even very great act of, you know—it’s just common sense. This is what’s there. This is what’s in the text. You know, it’s just common sense, logical reading. And so why do we deny it?
And I make the case in my book—I mean, actually, just… I just highlight again Terrence Hawkes’ reading, so it’s not even me making the case, it’s Terrence Hawkes who first makes the case. But I sort of bring that to the fore again—is that there may be class reasons, you know, for in the same way that we kind of want to repress the magnitude of what the Russian Revolution was about. There may be a real reason why we’re reading the Hamlet text and denying, you know, what is ostensibly true.
The text doesn’t really make much sense, that Hamlet never gets the verification that he wants, and that only by the confession—which is given to the audience, the reading audience, exclusively—does the play make any sense, and that without that confession, the play makes no sense. So that it’s actually, in the world of play, completely unresolved, because Claudius has never tried, at the end of the play, for the crimes that we want him to be tried for.
Nobody ever finds out, in the world of the play, that he actually did kill Hamlet’s father. The reason Hamlet kills him at the end is because he poisons Hamlet, he poisons Ophelia, he poisons Laertes, and everyone knows he’s guilty of that. So when Hamlet kills him, oh yeah, it’s good—kill that evil person. But nobody can say, at the end of the play, in the world of the play, “Oh, you know what? Claudius actually also killed Hamlet’s father.” There’s no proof. The only proof is that it’s the ghost. The ghost is not in the proof.
Anyhow, so having said all that, I propose in reading Hamlet that one way that reading that anomaly makes perfect textual sense is to suppose that Shakespeare is portending not the eventual rise and domination of the English language and the English civilization on the planet—whether it be through Britain and America. Shakespeare is portending the end of the civilization that he is the spokesman for. I mean, certainly in hindsight, he’s the spokesman for, but he never could have known in his historical moment—1601 that’s when Hamlet was first performed.
He couldn’t have known at that time that Britain would become what it would become, that the English language would become the hegemonic language of domination. It’s almost like, at the cultural genesis of any cultural explosion, all possibilities are present. So yes, the possibility of the progress can be read into Shakespeare. But Shakespeare couldn’t have known about the progress, so the possibility of progress and of complete cultural extinction is also always present—always already present—at the time of genesis, you know, at the time of the explosion of the English language, which was Elizabeth in England.
So one way to read that text so that it makes perfect textual sense is that the resolvability, Shakespeare almost inserts that into the play because he sees the resolvability of… and almost the cultural, linguistic contradictions. He sees a culture exhausting itself, right from the get-go. Now, what happens at the end of Hamlet? Everybody takes Hamlet as, oh, you know, there’s a reading that I mentioned in my book that Hamlet, you know, in his dying breath, makes a call to the election’s future.
And at the end of the play, Denmark is overtaken by Norway, right? And Norway comes in. So basically, it’s like a coup d’etat. I mean, it’s like a vanquishing. It’s like an invasion. Norway comes in. Denmark is finished. And there’s some evidence there that maybe Fortinbras, the leader of Norway is going to… Okay, maybe we’ll have elections in the future, and to see how to deal with Denmark or something. So it seems like Shakespeare and Hamlet, at that time, is at the beginning of a cultural project that is only ascending.
You see what I mean? And, you know, with elections in the future and stuff like that. And even though Hamlet died, you know, it still portends something positive, and the historical record proves, you know, if we read in hindsight, because Shakespeare and Hamlet are at the beginning of a cultural project that seems to be just getting underway. How could Hamlet be talking about the death of a civilization, of even his own civilization?
We can’t read that. But what I’m saying is now, because the death of the Western civilization and of English literature and these crises—like these crises of interpretation we’re talking about—cannot be resolved. Shakespeare could equally be read, and Hamlet could equally be read, as portending the death of the very civilization that he’s in, and not its continuance and its progress. So I’m saying that is one profitable way to read the play.
And it simultaneously means that it means Shakespeare is calling out the end-life or the shelf-life of the English language, of English civilization, and not the happy, linear progression, rationality, and conquering and domination of the planet that there is just as much potential within the English-speaking world and the English culture for internal implosion and destruction, which is what has come to pass, and which is one reason, right?
Which is one reason why John Dover Wilson doesn’t like Walter Wilson Greg’s reading of the play, because Greg’s reading of the play—even though Greg didn’t mean it—portends this possibility. You know, Shakespeare isn’t out to be at the helm of cultural flourishing, cultural events. He is pretending complete cultural destruction and annihilation. High five, Walter Wilson-Greg! That’s my kind of reading. And that’s where I stand. And that’s what I tried to show in my book.
Jeff: Amazing.
Amir: Yes. Okay, I concluded that. All right.
Jeff: Well, bravo, bravo. I’m impressed.
Amir: Oh, yeah. Thank you.
Jeff: Listen, one question—and you say it’s very scholarly and not for popular reading—but I hope people will read your other books. And also this one, if they’re interested enough in Shakespeare, because I did read your book on cinema.
Amir: Right. The movies. Yes. So gracious of you, Jeff. Yes. Probably one of the few people in the world.
Jeff: Well, I doubt that. But I did read your book on cinema, which was really fascinating. And I think you’ve done a book on Macbeth also, didn’t you?
Amir: I did a reading of the play in my first book. Yeah, I think it was the third or fourth chapter.
Jeff: Okay. All right. All right. Well, what I’d like to ask you for everybody to reflect on is, why is Shakespeare? Why does he have such… I mean, universal and eternal appeal. I mean, there are Shakespeare plays in almost every language on earth. And he’s still doing movies and, you know, movies are based on Shakespearean plots and stuff. What is his appeal?
Amir: Oh, the short answer to that is because the English-speaking world—mainly Britain and the United States—still owns the lion’s share of the world surplus capital. And when you own the lion’s share of the world surplus capital, whoever you nominate as your crowning philosopher or poet or cultural icon will be forced upon the world’s imaginations. And that’s what’s going on. So look, I would almost say, if you’re a native speaker of English, Shakespeare is a fine choice for nominee, you know.
And as a native speaker of English, the wonderful language play and the wonderful poetry and the wonderful rhythm and music, and the durability of the text. I mean, Shakespeare really is a god to any native speaker or anybody who wants to really see our language and hear our language and read our language spoken, written at its finest. Shakespeare is… Yes, he is… there’s Shakespeare and there’s everyone else. I mean, I fully believe that. But now whether or not Shakespeare has any business, and as you say, all over the world?
It’s a bit like, if you want your share of the surplus wealth, you have to copy what the imperialist countries are doing. Economically, let’s say. You have to do what they’re doing. Culturally, that expresses itself, well, in order for our books and our plays and our cultural tradition to mean, Shakespeare should have something to say to them, or they have something to say to Shakespeare. Now, I really… and I do mention this a little bit in my book. Maybe I’ll just briefly… I don’t want to, again, pontificate blah, blah, blah too much.
But there is John Locke—anyway, British sort of a philosopher—and when he wrote a lot on politics and stuff like that. John Locke talks about this idea of a state of nature. He’s talking about politics, right? Meaning, and the state of nature means when somebody has the power of life and death over you. Before him, there was another philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, and he talked about the state of nature, but he called it the state of nature. He equated the state of nature with the state of war.
You know, life is nasty, brutish, and short. You know, there are just a whole bunch of competing wills. And unless all competing wills subsume themselves to the one Leviathan, the one will, they will just be fighting and internal destruction and war. So, it’s basically an apology for the monarchy. You need to have one solid leviathan political force that all will bow down towards. Otherwise, everybody will kill each other. And John Locke is kind of responding to this in the Leviathan.
There is a time when the people have the ability and the duty to rise up. So anyway, my point is, John Locke does not equate the state of nature with a state of war, because he talks, for example, about women and children. And he says, women and children can be in a state of nature with their husbands and fathers, meaning a father or a husband has the power of life and death over their kids and over their wife. But that doesn’t mean that they are necessarily a tyrant.
You can be in a state of nature and in a sweet state, because not all men aren’t assholes to their wives, and not all men beat their kids or beat their wives. Some of them do, sure. But the point is, you are in that state of vulnerability, you know? If you’re a child—let’s just put the gender question aside for a second—a child lives in a state of nature with their parents. Even if their parents are good people, their life and death depend on what their parents can do. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a state of war.
So you can be in a state of nature, but in a sweet state. But eventually, the child has to grow up, and you want to exit that state of nature. And this is where political consent comes in. The idea is that, okay, for a while, you just accept the authority of somebody that’s given bigger than you. But in an ideal state, the child will grow up and give a form of express consent and say, “You know what? I agree to this rule that you have over me,” and whatnot. And if you don’t get to that state, you don’t have real liberty.
That makes sense, right? So now, what does this have to do with Shakespeare? My feeling is that the Shakespeare industry, whenever it goes out into the world to try and be like, “Hey,” you know. So guys like me—well, globalist Shakespeare’s, you know—because they mean well. They’re well-meaning. They want to go out, and they want Shakespeare to mean, and nobody knows why Shakespeare means.
And we don’t have any approach that is, but maybe we want to make sure that Shakespeare isn’t a cultural, dominant, hegemonic force. So we want to include other figure traditions, other dramaturgies, other, and we want to see what the resonances are and what the overlaps are. And we want to have collaboration and—yay!—this all sounds nice and fun and wonderful. But what I say in my book is, that not a symmetrical relationship.
Because for Shakespeare, Shakespeare will exist because of the institutional force of the English language and the power of the British Empire—well, the once-British Empire, now the American Empire. But because of the imperial, dominating power of the English language, which controls all information and controls all culture and imposes itself on all cultures, no matter where you are, that is why Shakespeare means—not because of anything in Shakespeare, but because of power. That’s really why.
Jeff: Because he was an English.
Amir: So when you have Shakespeare put next to global literacy… Right, exactly. Exactly. Yes. So, you know, I’m not saying that Shakespeare himself wanted to crush all these other cultures and… no. But of course he’s going to be used that way. Of course he is. So, without any authorial intention, of course, he is a hegemonic power. And the relationship that, let’s say, Chinese Shakespeare or Chinese adaptations of Shakespeare have to Shakespeare is not symmetrical, meaning Shakespeare will exist no matter what.
But no one is going to pay attention. I mean, the world—the global community—is not going to pay attention to your theater tradition, to your provincial customs, unless you can prove that it has some metal or has something to do with Shakespeare. So Shakespeare and these other cultures—I mean, you talk about this universal appeal—but this universal appeal, which seems to be sort of accommodating, and that kind of multicultural and humane.
What it actually displays is two cultures existing side by side in a state of nature, with Shakespeare having the power of life and death over these other cultures and these other theatrical traditions. And if you don’t write plays and have performances that engage with Shakespeare, your culture dies off, but Shakespeare will also live.
So this is not as symmetrical as many people who do this kind of written I don’t… you know… I know many people who do this kind of global Shakespeare kind of research, they believe that they’re doing it in good faith and their intentions are good, but they can’t see that you occupy a state of imperialism, and you’re trying to write these foreign theatrical traditions into Shakespeare—is an act of imaginative colonization.
Jeff: Wow, I can imagine that your students really love your classes at Hunan Normal University.
Amir: Well, I’m sure it’s 50.
Jeff: You must be an amazing professor. Well, listen, Amir, you and I are good friends. We could talk for hours and hours, but I want the fans out there to learn about your work, to learn about what you’re doing and let’s call it quits here and maybe have another—just a private phone call together sometime.
Amir: Definitely, yeah. No, that was fun. I think I said.
Jeff: I mean, this is really amazing stuff which I would have never thought of and it’s really fascinating.
Amir: Well, thank you. Thank you, gentlemen.
Jeff: And I think the fans out there will feel the same. Anyway, I will give you a wonderful Buddhist bow.
Amir: Okay, yes. Awesome. I will do the same. I will just copy. Okay, here we go.
Jeff: And this is Jeff J. Brown talking to Amir Khan, a proud member of the China Writers Group. And his latest book on Hamlet, and he’s an amazing writer. I will have all his information for his Substack, etc. His point of view is refreshingly different than the mumbo jumbo mainstream media barf that we are subjected to in the mass media. So thank you for sharing all this, and I hope the book makes you rich.
Jeff: All right, guy, don’t hang up, and then I’ll just stop the recording.
Amir: Sure
Jeff: Alright.
China Writers A to Z. Connect with Amir Khan! He is your Dr. Shakespeare who lives and works in Sinoland…
Posts
https://substack.com/@hmachine1949
Professor’s page
https://fsc.hunnu.edu.cn/info/1103/10302.htm
Interviews
www.radiosinoland.com/search/?q=amir
Social media
WeChat: counterfactualkhan
Amir Khan has published the following write-up based on our discussion today.
“Why Read Hamlet?” PDF download…
Why Read Hamlet, by Amir Khan 250105
Amir’s latest article publication is a close-reading of the sci-fi blockbuster, The Wandering Earth 2:
“The Ignition of Species Being: A Marxian Reading of The Wandering Earth 2.”
To order Amir Khan’s latest book, please click below:
The Death of Hamlet (2025)
If you would like to order a hardcopy of his previous books, you can order here:
Comedies of Nihilism (2017)
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-59894-9
Shakespeare in Hindsight (2016)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/shakespeare-in-hindsight/8A80123468B7FFB4D2B660BD70FE418D
All of Amir Khan’s previous books, articles, and reviews are available in full-text PDFs at his Researchgate page:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Amir-Khan-63
https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Hindsight-Counterfactual-Shakespearean-Philosophy/dp/1474426042/
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003464334/death-hamlet-amir-khan
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-59894-9
https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783319598932
Amir has recently reviewed the following titles (full-text e-copies available at the ResearchGate link above):
Jie Li. Cinematic Guerillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia University Press, 2023). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/27683524.2024.2423562
Justin O’Connor and Xin Gu. Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China (Intellect, 2020). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03098168241234512i
Richard van Oort. Shakespeare’s Mad Men (Stanford University Press, 2023). https://academic.oup.com/sq/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/sq/quad015/7187114?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Emily Sun. On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China (Fordham University Press, 2021). https://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Modern-Language-Review-118-1
Zhou Chenshu. Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China (University of California Press, 2021). https://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article/76/1/102/192952/Review-Cinema-Off-Screen-Moviegoing-in-Socialist
Ang Yuen Yuen. China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption. (Cambridge University Press, 2021). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14789299221117452
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JEFF J. BROWN, Editor, China Rising, and Senior Editor & China Correspondent, Dispatch from Beijing, The Greanville Post
Jeff J. Brown is a geopolitical analyst, journalist, lecturer and the author of The China Trilogy. It consists of 44 Days Backpacking in China – The Middle Kingdom in the 21st Century, with the United States, Europe and the Fate of the World in Its Looking Glass (2013); Punto Press released China Rising – Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (2016); and BIG Red Book on China (2020). As well, he published a textbook, Doctor WriteRead’s Treasure Trove to Great English (2015). Jeff is a Senior Editor & China Correspondent for The Greanville Post, where he keeps a column, Dispatch from Beijing and is a Global Opinion Leader at 21st Century. He also writes a column for The Saker, called the Moscow-Beijing Express. Jeff writes, interviews and podcasts on his own program, China Rising Radio Sinoland, which is also available on YouTube, Stitcher Radio, iTunes, Ivoox and RUvid. Guests have included Ramsey Clark, James Bradley, Moti Nissani, Godfree Roberts, Hiroyuki Hamada, The Saker and many others. [/su_spoiler]
Jeff can be reached at China Rising, je**@br***********.com, Facebook, Twitter, Wechat (+86-19806711824/Mr_Professor_Brown, and Line/Telegram/Whatsapp: +33-612458821.
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[google-translator]
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