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Locations of Comparison

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2018

Joseph R. Slaughter
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Abstract

What difference does it make who compares? From what location? What kinds of comparison are possible, inevitable, even necessary at particular historical moments? What are the extra-literary conditions of literary comparison? How and when does literature qualify for comparison? Revisiting Harry Levin’s seminal essay, “Comparing the Literature” (1968), this paper—originally presented as the presidential address at the 2017 American Comparative Literature Association conference—considers the historical conditions and locational contingencies that motivate acts of literary comparison. Looking at how specific comparisons of African literature to European literature have been mobilized at different times and locations, I argue that comparative literature’s de facto immigration policies (its [in]hospitality to other worlds of literature) may be read in the histories of comparisons that have been done before—comparisons once regarded as improper, impertinent, or insurgent that are now commonly practiced to give old Eurocentric fields new life, new prestige, and new authority.

Keywords

comparative literatureworld literatureAfrican literatureglobal modernismscomparative strategic essentialismspolitics of comparisonimmigrant literatureidentity politicsimmigration policyinternationalism
Type
Paradigm
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , April 2018 , pp. 209 - 226
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

1 A shorter version of this paper was given as the presidential address to the American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting in July 2017.

2 Levin, Harry, “Comparing the Literature,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 17 (1968): 5–16 Google Scholar.

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9 Levin, “Comparing the Literature,” 7–8.

10 Levin, “Comparing the Literature,” 7.

11 Levin, “Comparing the Literature,” 9.

12 Levin, “Comparing the Literature,” 6.

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15 The anticipated globalization of American comparative literature—sometimes dreaded, sometimes touted—would come (if it has come) much later than Levin might have feared; indeed, despite the promotional multicultural rhetoric of the 1990s, according to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s estimation in her Wellek Library Lectures in 2000, “The general model in Comparative Literature seemed still . . . to be Europe and the extracurricular Orient.” Chakravorty Spivak, Gayatri, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 6 Google Scholar.

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21 Unlike the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which has been retroactively enshrined as the foundation of modern internationalism, the Peace of Utrecht (1713) stabilized both the balance of power in Europe and the nation-state as the organic administrative form of political (and, later, cultural) difference. See Sashalmi, Endre, “The Novelty of the Utrecht Peace Settlement (1713),” Central European Papers 3.2 (2015): 20–33 Google Scholar.

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25 As I discuss later in this essay, I am thinking in particular of the institutionalization of world literature, global modernisms, and transnational american studies, which have all recently “discovered,” even as their predecessors once dismissed, comparisons already made by nonprivileged (generally minor or minority) commentators in the world of letters who compared literature from marginalized places to the literature from Europe. Those comparisons were often rejected or ignored by the stewards of the literature to which they compared, but they are now being repeated and remade from the heights of institutional privilege by scholars in current positions of stewardship in order to claim new relevance for their own fields. The scramble for other people’s comparisons today repeats in many ways the attitudes of “the displaced European intellectuals who built the profession” of American comparative literature and who, as Françoise Lionnet notes, largely ignored the literature of their American location, filled with the enthusiasm of a settler colonist who disregards the history of the space they now occupy, imagining only “the opportunities that come with virgin territory.” Lionnet, Françoise, “Spaces of Comparison,” Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimmer (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995): 165–174 Google Scholar, esp. 169.

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32 Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 59–60.

33 Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 60.

34 Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 61 fn.18.

35 Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 57.

36 Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 57.

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48 Chow, “The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies: A Post-European Perspective,” 294.

49 Chow, “The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies: A Post-European Perspective,” 304.

50 I offer just one example of the immigration barriers raised by the embedded assumption that a literature must be national in order to be both international and comparable. In a provocative essay from 1975—titled “Are There Any National Literatures in Sub-Saharan Black Africa Yet?”—Bernth Lindfors observed that while “artificially created ethnic conglomerations . . . became independent African nation-states recognized and seated at the U.N.,” “[j]udged by any of the standard criteria for measuring the ‘nationality’ of a literature . . . modern African literatures fall far short of qualifying for full-scale literary independence.” Lindfors, Bernth, “Are There Any National Literatures in Sub-Saharan Black Africa Yet?” English in Africa 2.2 (1975): 1–9 Google Scholar, esp. 1–2. The implication, from the perspective of Levin’s model of comparative literature, would be that there may be nothing to compare coming out of Africa until there are African national literatures.

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54 There is an interesting paradox to note here: the suggestion to separate Francophone literatures from French literature proposes the opposite position from some postcolonial political leaders who chose to have their countries remain part of France; likewise, the proposal to read and teach Anglophone literatures as part of the family of English literature(s) seems contrary to the political solution of Anglophone African countries that demanded full independence from Great Britain.

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59 Povey, “African Literature and American Universities,” 17. A similar sentiment is articulated in the inaugural editorial statement for the African Studies Bulletin, the first official publication of the African Studies Association, which was dedicated primarily to collecting and disseminating bibliographic information about social science research work on Africa. In the first issue in 1958, Melville J. Herskovits, president of the ASA, laid out his hopes that the new journal might facilitate “the comparative studies that are essential if we are to make analyses that have the depth needed to give adequate discernment” and “to achieve world-wide adjustment.” Herskovits, Melville J., “Editorial,” African Studies Bulletin 1.1 (1958): 1–2 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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64 Irele, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, 14.

65 Harlow, Barbara, “Othello’s Season of Migration,” Edebiyat 4.2 (1979): 157–175 Google Scholar. For an example of a recent claim to have recovered Salih’s novel for an expanding modernist studies by making old comparisons anew, see Stanford Friedman’s, Susan “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies,” Modernism/Modernity 13.3 (2006): 425–443 Google Scholar. Friedman notes Harlow’s rejection of her appropriative comparison (431), but the impressive list of prior scholarship on the topic that might trouble her modernist claim (which Harlow apparently provided to Friedman) is elided in the text of her essay, buried in footnote 39.

66 Povey, “African Literature and American Universities,” 19.

67 Chow, “The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies: A Post-European Perspective,” 302.

68 Chow, “The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies: A Post-European Perspective,” 298.