Comparative Literature

Palumbo-Liu, David

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8255295

Palumbo-Liu explores the relation of literature and ethics, noting that literature is always about “something else.” Drawing from a number of specific cases, including the Rohingya refugee crisis, he connects material histories with cultural practices that defy simple thematization. With reference to Anton Shammas, Bessie Head, and John Berger, he reflects critically on the practice of comparison as embedded in the ethics of knowledge production.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8255306

This article tracks the ethical ambivalence of the native. First, there is a nativism drawn out with reference to Melissa Kennedy and Gary Okihiro that reframes the native in a poetic impulse, asks for a redistributive epistemological change in knower and known, and can rescue nativism into an acknowledgement of complicity. Second, there are acknowledgments of complicity that can pluck nativism away from the divisive compartmentalization that it seems to foster, as can be seen in the work of Soumaya Mestiri. The article ends with remarks from Buci Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood to underscore a critique of nativism in the rural-urban interface in Nigeria that is globally instructive and to point out the fact that woman is never native.

Warrior, Robert

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8255317

Noting the entwined histories of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, Robert Warrior investigates the place of Native Americans in colonial hierarchies manifest across US history, from an 1804 encounter in Washington, DC, between the Osage people and Thomas Jefferson—in which Jefferson claims that the Osage were among “the finest men we have ever seen”—to the January 2019 media event surrounding Nathan Phillips and Nicholas Sandmann on the National Mall. Drawing from the work of Arica Coleman, he notes that Jefferson’s seeming high regard for the Osage people masks his ideological commitment to racial purity, and he casts these reflections alongside movements such as Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter.

Ghosh, Amitav

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8255328

Common as it is to map languages as colored patches of a global quilt, this article proposes an understanding of language, dialect, and multilingualism beyond territoriality. The author references different regions where multilingualism and registers of discourse are indices not so much of mastery, but of pragmatics. With examples drawn from his own works The Shadow Lines and The Hungry Tide, the author ultimately questions the linguistic determinism of national literary paradigms.

Whitfield, Esther

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8255339

Guantánamo as a site whose legal contortions and human rights abuses have global reach and urgency has long been the focus of the many scholars, lawyers, and activists who have fought to keep its detention centers in the public eye. And yet, alongside advocates who have insisted on the site’s urgent moral ties to the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and the international community broadly defined—and in defiance of both a US war on “terror” and a Cuban war on “imperialism”—there have persisted smaller-scale gestures aimed at situating the Guantánamo naval base as geographically continuous with, and affectively connected to, Cuba. This article reads the poetry of Mohammed el Gharani and Ibrahim al-Rubaish, former detainees included in Marc Falkoff’s collection Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, and of José Ramón Sánchez, longtime resident of the Cuban city of Guantánamo, as a form of regional literature produced on contested ground. It proposes that, when read across the dividing line and between languages, poetry presents a more intimate and locally specific Guantánamo than the widely known version.

Yoon, Duncan M.

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8255350

The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) presence in Africa has fundamentally changed globalization patterns. Most scholarship interrogates whether the Chinese presence is either a “new colonialism” or a “win-win” for development by focusing on economic or social scientific factors. In contrast, this article examines China as a trope in Congo Inc. (2014) by In Koli Jean Bofane. Congo Inc. is one of the first African novels to take the Africa-China relationship as central theme, depicting how Congolese actors negotiate the PRC’s presence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The article examines the unexpected partnership of a trickster, Isookanga, and a stranded Chinese national, Zhang Xia, analyzing their partnership according to the relationship between time and globalization. The argument uses the concept of the postcolony’s durées to demonstrate how the narrative creates a global South temporality, which differentiates Africa-China patterns of globalization from previous instantiations. These durées include Isookanga’s digital consciousness enabled by a PRC-built cell tower; allusions to Chinese history; and Isookanga and Zhang Xia’s collaboration on Eau Pire Suisse. In sum Congo Inc.’s innovative temporality, embodied by the term mondialiste, signals a shift in type of postcolonial narrative toward the global South novel.

Dragunoiu, Dana

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8255361

The article contributes to the long-standing debate about Lolita’s final nine chapters by arguing for a much tighter connection than previously acknowledged between Nabokov’s most famous novel and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Turning on the claim that Dolly’s alleged letter from Coalmont has a precedent in the Recherche, the essay proposes that Humbert fabricates the letter from Dolly for similar reasons that Proust’s Narrator makes himself believe that a telegram he receives from Gilberte is a missive from Albertine. The phantom letter in Lolita and the garbled telegram in the Recherche are psychologically therapeutic exercises in misreading and gestures toward paths not taken. But in Nabokov’s case, it is also an experiment in writing the kind of literary freedom he theorized in his 1941 lecture on drama titled “The Tragedy of Tragedy.” The article argues that Dolly’s potential vanishing act pays homage to the mercurial personalities that Nabokov encountered in Proust’s novel and the unconventional literary structures he admired in the works of Pushkin and Chekhov.