Comparing the Literatures of the Global South
COMPARATIVE METHODS LECTURE SERIES
Can a non-Eurocentric comparative literature be imagined? Historically and epistemologically, comparative literature began, and has largely remained, a subset of European studies. The very ideas of “comparison” and “literature” have a well-known 19th-century provenance, invested in nationalism, scientific positivism and geopolitical rivalry manifested in nation- and empire-building projects. The comparative literature of old was all about Europe — and specifically “about one quarter of the NATO-nations.” Forays of the discipline into other parts of the world in recent decades have for the most part been undertaken from a firmly European, or Euro-U.S., base. Postcolonial studies put a new twist on this centrality by breaking up one side of Orientalism’s East-West dichotomy but has otherwise preserved the other pole as a necessary the point of reference, a nameable antagonist. As a critique of colonial representation, discourse and epistemology, postcolonial studies — as its name signifies — could not do without the centrality of the West, if only in the form of a reverse Eurocentrism. To signify this paradoxical reversal while acknowledging its invaluable contribution, Waïl Hassan described the postcolonial approach to comparative studies as the North-South paradigm, and called attention to the no less paradoxical admission of previously excluded literatures into the sphere of comparison at the cost of tying them to colonial history and metropolitan canons. The fact that literatures written in colonial languages, English and French, have claimed the lion’s share of scholarly attention in postcolonial studies, or that “World English” and “Francophonie” have enormously revitalized English and French departments in American universities, respectively, is no accident.
A shift in perspective from Eurocentric paradigms, including the vertical North-South axis, to interregional, or cross-regional, South-South relations can, in principle, bypass both the centrality of (post)colonial relations and their monolingual spheres (the Anglophone, the Francophone, the Hispanophone, the Lusophone) to advance the project of decolonizing knowledge. This is not an argument for displacing the postcolonial — something that is neither possible not desirable — but for opening a space for a trans-regional approach to literatures of the Global South that draws on the philological and polyglot resources of comparative literature while disavowing the centrality of Europe.
About the speaker
Waïl S. Hassan is professor and head of the Department of Comparative & World Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association. A specialist in modern Arabic literature and intellectual history, Hassan is the author, editor, and translator of nine books, guest editor of six journal issues, and author of over eighty articles, chapters, and reviews. His most recent publications include Arab Brazil: Fictions of Ternary Orientalism (Oxford, 2024) and the forthcoming collection O mundo árabe e o Brasil (Makunaima, 2024).