Comparative Literature

Feldman, Keith P.;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3507892

This introductory essay considers the critical purchase of “relationality” in current scholarly debates in Comparative Ethnic Studies and Comparative Literature. It foregrounds Blackness and/as incommensurability as they are treated in these fields' distinct and overlapping institutional locations, historical developments, and epistemic investments. Black Studies racial relationality incommensurability state violence coloniality

Schleitwiler, Vince;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3507902

This essay connects recent academic debates over antiblackness and the rise of new theories and methods of comparison to the movements against police violence that are gaining visibility after the protests in Ferguson, MO, arguing that they all demonstrate the fracturing of “multiculturalism” as the governing sociopolitical imagination of racial justice sponsored by U.S. global power. It reads the production of blackness and antiblackness in the Ferguson protests through a concept of “imperialism's racial justice” and reviews W.E.B. Du Bois's 1899 development of a theory and method of comparison (the “color line”) in response to lynching and imperial conquest. Arguing that the question of comparison in the present must be resolved by collective action rather than scholarship, it tentatively suggests a few possible lines of study attuned to the local and geopolitical dynamics of race and conquest. comparative ethnic studies W.E.B. Du Bois Ferguson MO antiblackness police violence

Pickens, Therí A.;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3507912

This essay asks what kinds of theoretical paradigms are possible in a geographical space where the foundational racial split is along the fault lines of Blackness and whiteness. What other relationships are possible between communities of color in this geo-political, socio-cultural space? In keeping with this forum's emphasis on “relationality,” I argue for a turn to Blackness since it troubles the emphasis on Eurocentric ways of thinking and disrupts the linear progressive narrative with which we are all acquainted. To relate to Blackness as a deliberate choice authorizes a reconceptualization of history, culture, and politics (including, and perhaps most especially, the democratic experiment of the United States). As an example, I turn to the circuits of transmission between Black and Arab communities as a way to think through the ways Arab American immigrant narratives and conceptions of futurity shift when Blackness becomes the principal critical lens. Race Black Arab American futurity literary theory

Shih, Shu-Mei;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3507922

This essay deploys “relational comparison” to address the ways in which texts from different parts of the world are related to each other through their partaking and representation of world historical events. It constructs an arc of literary texts that are not distinguished by their presumed canonicity, whether Eurocentric or otherwise, but by their worldliness. It turns to the global decolonial moment of the 1960s to read that world historical event as a world literary event. By framing the racial, national, and imperial formations that resonate out from Bandung and China, the essay seeks to offer a more nuanced interpretation of the global sixties from those perspectives situated south — whether in terms of actual or symbolic geographies — of the so-called Global South. In doing so, it connects Paris, Bandung, and Beijing to Saigon, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, and Surabaya. Relational comparison Bandung China world literature W.E.B. Du Bois

Leo, Russ;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3507932

Written in Dutch and set in imperial Rome, Geeraardt Brandt's De Veinzende Torquatus ( The Feigning Torquatus , 1645) bears unmistakable traces of an encounter with Hamlet . More than a literary-historical curio, Torquatus reveals much about Continental adaptations of, and audiences for, English dramatic works. This essay introduces Brandt and his intellectual milieu, demonstrating how and why he turned to Hamlet in an early investigation of revenge tragedy and political realism. From the dynamic plots to the histrionic style of performance, English drama offered Brandt a vision of political life not unlike the political realism of Tacitus and Machiavelli. While attending to the complexities and problems of establishing its provenance, the essay excavates the tragic vision of political life at work in Torquatus — a version of politics that struck Dutch audiences as prescient in its capacity to render visible the erratic and ultimately realistic behavior of sovereigns and subjects alike. Hamlet Shakespeare Reception Dutch Literature Geeraardt Brandt Machiavelli

Vicente, Marta V.;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3507942

In January 1786, the Spanish Inquisition accused the Mexican theologian and bibliographer José Mariano de Beristain of purchasing, possessing, and reading aloud the French pornographic novel Le Portier des Chartreux ( The Porter of the Charter House ). Flouting his vows, the clergyman had invited men and women to his bedroom, read them the novel, and showed its illustrations. Beristain's story offers a rare glimpse into readership practices and the transmission of ideas in the eighteenth-century Spanish world. Le Portier was not just pornographic; it also had a philosophical and political message that, according to current scholarship, instilled radical ideas in readers. Beristain's story, however, shows that instead of absorbing the intended message, readers either were scandalized or simply took pleasure in the pornographic elements of the story. Their understanding of Le Portier thus challenges the idea that “politically motivated pornography” directly affected public opinion in the late eighteenth century. Enlightenment Colonial Mexico Religion History French Literature

Dewulf, Jeroen;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3507952

This article aims to provide a better understanding of the complexities involving Stefan Zweig's Brazil: Land of the Future (1941) by analyzing Zweig's encounter with Brazil in relation to that of the French modernist Blaise Cendrars. Rather than search for traces of Cendrars's writings in those of Zweig, however, the goal is to interpret their work within the broader context of the intellectual debate on race and identity in Brazil. While much has been written about Cendrars's impact on Brazilian modernism, his contribution to the development of the concept of Brazil's multiracial identity has received little attention. This article shows that Cendrars introduced a different approach to racial mixture in Brazil that was influenced by the work of Nietzsche. A connection to Cendrars's role in the construction of Brazil's multiracial national identity allows for a better understanding of Zweig's laudatory portrayal of Brazil as the land of the future. Race and Identity Futurism Fascism Exile Literature Latin America

Edmeades, Lynley;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3507962

John Cage's “Empty Words” (1974–75) was designed to collapse the space between music and language. In attempting to do so, the work simultaneously disrupts and depends upon expectations generated by our regular interpretive frameworks. Using contemporary affect theory, I offer a new reading of “Empty Words” that locates and examines the pre-semiotic, pre-categorical dimensions of the state that occurs when these expectations are thrown into disarray. To examine the affective dynamic in Cage's cultivation of polysemy and indeterminacy, I draw on Brian Massumi's categorization of the event. I also employ Sianne Ngai's term “stuplimity” to discuss Cage's 1977 performance of “Empty Words” and to deconstruct the affective dynamic generated between Cage and his audience. While Cage is seeking to disintegrate the distance between music and language, he is simultaneously dependent on these frameworks to generate and prolong an affective engagement with the work. John Cage “Empty Words” affect theory stuplimity pre-semantic musication

Just, Daniel;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3507972

This essay discusses the implications of Milan Kundera's conception of the novel for literary theory and history. It presents Kundera's theory of the novel as a search for a type of didacticism that inscribes the reader in a process of learning that does not have a concrete content or object of knowledge, but instead activates the reader's faculty of reflection and self-reflection. Kundera addresses this reflective attitude to the text as maturity and applies it to life at large. Maturity is not about learning correct values or coming to terms with reality; it is not about attaining the ultimate moment of completeness and definitive truths. Rather, maturity is a process and practice that embraces change and the capacity to see life from different perspectives. The novel is a catalyst and medium of this practice because it stimulates our ability to think, question, and, as a result, change. Milan Kundera Novel Literary Knowledge Ethical Criticism Transformative Fictions