Ideas of the Decade

Academic Boycott

Salah D. Hassan

Since the 1990s “progressive tendencies” in literary studies have harnessed comparative methodologies to textual analysis of human rights documents, interpretations of geopolitical systems, and critiques of foreign policy. As comparative literature has increasingly engaged in world affairs, comparative critical approaches have influence critical writing on boycotts from the anti-apartheid movement to Palestine solidarity activism. The issue of academic boycott in particular has generated prolific and polarizing public debates among literary scholars, at the center of which is a general question about the place of pro-Palestinian activism in the academy.

Ideas of the Decade

Corporate Personhood

Purnima Bose and Laura E. Lyons

Corporate Personhood refers to the concept that a corporation, as a group of people, enjoys some of the same legal rights and privileges as individuals. While many scholars and critics of this doctrine point to its origins in the nineteenth century, others note that it dates back to the medieval period when the Catholic Church conducted property transactions in its own name.

Ideas of the Decade

Discursive Possession

Wendy Laura Belcher

Discursive possession is a new model of European authorial agency in the colonial and postcolonial context. Rather than positing European authors as masters deliberately selecting delicacies from the smorgasbord of the exotic other, the model imagines European texts and authors as experiencing discursive possession by the other.

Ideas of the Decade

Next: New Orality

Charlotte Eubanks

Conceptions of “orality,” a big idea of the 1980s, held that the introduction of writing enforced global, fundamental cognitive changes to human society. That model has exhausted itself. What’s next?

Ideas of the Decade

The Sinophone

Yucong Hao

Sinophone literature, a term coined by Shu-mei Shih in 2004, describes (per Shih) Sinitic-language literature written “on the margins of China and Chineseness.” As an emerging field of inquiry, the Sinophone provides a conceptual alternative to the paradigm of China-based national literary studies; as an organizing category, the Sinophone evinces the plurality of cultural identities, linguistic practices, and ethnicities of Sinitic-language communities around the world. It also crystallizes discussions—the destabilization of Chineseness in the era of transnationalization and the reflections on the hegemony of China and Sinocentric discourses—that have penetrated the field of Chinese studies since the 1990s.

Ideas of the Decade

Human Rights

Sophia A. McClennen

Regardless of period or region of scholarly focus, one would be hard pressed to find a field of comparative literary research that has not been touched by “the human rights turn.” If the cultural turn signaled the critical response to post 60s politics, and the 90s were marked by the postcolonial turn, then perhaps the human rights turn best characterizes the period following the attacks of 9/11/2001.

Ideas of the Decade

Petro-

Michael Rubenstein

Amitav Ghosh coined the term “petrofiction” as the title of his review of Abdelraman Munif’s quintet of novels Cities of Salt in the March 1992 issue of The New Republic. There Ghosh pointed out just how few novels about the “Oil Encounter” between the United States and the Middle East had up until then ever been written. Munif’s work was, in Ghosh’s view, the exception proving the rule that “the history of oil is a matter of embarrassment verging on the unspeakable, the pornographic.” But if in 1992 Ghosh meant by petrofiction simply a fiction directly concerned with the oil industry, then, in a 2012 issue of the American Book Review with a titular focus on “petrofiction,” Imre Szeman argued that the term ought to be construed far more capaciously – and controversially – as a grand new periodizing gesture.

Ideas of the Decade

Big Data

Jonathan E. Abel

Big data and digital humanities can not threaten traditional humanities, they can only inform them. As a set of tools to be used by humanists (on the same order as such traditional humanist tools as bookmarks, indexes, footnotes, underlinings, notecards), digital humanities will never rise to the point of becoming ends of humanistic inquiry in themselves. The recent flurry and fetish for a digital humanities, however, is but part of a long history of quantitative, positivistic humanist inquiry which supplements but cannot supplant the quests for information, knowledge, and truth which have and will continue to have formed the humanities.

Ideas of the Decade

Areas: Bigger than the Nation, Smaller than the World

Christopher Bush

Surely I was not the only one surprised by Gayatri Spivak’s having become, over the last decade, a kind of defender of a kind of Area Studies.

Ideas of the Decade

Thug

Henry Schwarz

The Thugs were hereditary highway robbers and stranglers who were violently suppressed by 1840. Yet the British kept discovering new threats to their authority. In 1871 almost two hundred tribal communities were criminalized, subject to surveillance, registration and confinement Thug today signifies a proud new identity assumed by African Americans critical of white supremacy, and of radical Indian performers reclaiming their images from the stereotype of inherited criminality.

Ideas of the Decade

Afropolitan

Aaron Bady

“Afropolitan” is not a politics, but it dresses in the commodified residue of political struggle, Fela Kuti’s style stripped of its revolutionary substance. In a displacement characteristic of our neoliberal age, the flows and circulation of capital become the pathway to individual self-realization. The Afropolitan declines to be Afro-pessimistic, then, because she has the privilege of declaring victory from the dance floor in London, the art exhibition in Rome, or the runway in New York.

Ideas of the Decade

Pandemic

Neville Hoad

The term “pandemic” shows the story of AIDS has always crossed borders: geopolitical, disciplinary, personal. From claims for an African origin, the positing of Canadian flight attendant Gaetan Dugas as patient zero in the North Atlantic epidemic to Kenyan truck drivers as agents of infection to the two decades long US ban on HIV positive immigrants inter alia, “pandemic” attempts to contain an impossibly proliferating disease and the persistently transnational stories that may be told about it.

Ideas of the Decade

Pseudotranslation

Brigitte Rath

The idea of pseudotranslation sharpens some central concepts of Comparative Literature. “World Literature,” according to David Damrosch, is “always as much about the host culture’s values and needs as it is about a work’s source culture” (283). Foregrounding a text’s imaginary origin in a different culture reads this “double refraction” as already built into a text. It thus stresses the conjecture and transnational imagination that is always involved in reading a text as world literature. Pseudotranslation as a mode of reading has also much to contribute to questions of translatability, representation, voice, authorship, authenticity, and multilingualism.

Ideas of the Decade

The Vernacular

S. Shankar

The work of critically engaging the vernacular, begun in a somewhat fragmentary way in the decade gone by, promises much if taken up more concertedly in the decade to come.

Ideas of the Decade

Postcolonial Studies

Sangeeta Ray

To think about postcolonial studies is to think in terms of crisis, death and futurity.

Ideas of the Decade

Performative Scholarship

Avram Alpert

Contemporary scholarship has a content problem. I do not mean that there is anything wrong with the actual contents of academic criticism. Rather, I mean that the academy focuses too narrowly on innovations in content. We assume that advances in modern scholarship will arrive as content-ideas and not as form-ideas. This state of affairs is endemic to an academic situation that privileges publication over pedagogy, knowledge of smaller periods over broad-based investigation, and that allows an economy of information to dictate an increasingly unjust labor market.

Ideas of the Decade

Counterinsurgency

Joseph R. Slaughter

Comparative literature has mostly disregarded the weaponization of culture under the counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) crafted for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, released as Army Field Manual 3-24 and published simultaneously by the University of Chicago Press. However, COIN has not ignored comparative literature. During the “counterinsurgency decade” (General David Petraeus’s words), comparative literature was (like everything else) entangled in the contest between insurgency and counterinsurgency.

Ideas of the Decade

Trans-

Jessica Berman

Over the past decade, Comparative Literature has become increasingly animated what I call “trans” critical perspectives. The rubric “trans” as I employ it has affinities with the kind of “trans-disciplinary” work that has always characterized Comparative Literature and that has motivated many of the prize winning books of the past several years. But it also draws from “transnational,” “trans-medial,” and “trans-gender” critical practice.

Ideas of the Decade

Climate Change

Jennifer Wenzel

An "Anthropocene literature" would pose challenges to periodization, not merely for the term's implicit dual designation of 1) what some argue is a new geological epoch that eclipsed the Holocene in the late eighteenth century, and 2) recent discussion across the disciplines, catalyzed by Eugene Stoermer's and Paul Crutzen's 2000 coinage of Anthropocene, to mark how human activity has transformed the geophysical processes of the planet.

Ideas of the Decade

Cosmopolitanism

Haun Saussy

Comparatists, one would think, are well placed to consider the harm done by nationalisms. Comparatists translate, relativize and transpose. Surely a nation cannot be all in all to them, just an example. And yet the shapers of the discipline held back from identifying comparative literature with a universal, ecumenical or cosmopolitan drive.

Ideas of the Decade

American Literature

Antonio Barrenechea

In July 1980, Earl E. Fitz, a professor of Spanish, Portuguese, and Comparative Literature at Penn State University, made the following prediction: “It is our contention that inter-American literary studies, naturally of a comparative nature, will prove themselves to be a major trend of the near future, one which will eventually establish itself as a permanent and vital part of every comparative literature department and program in the country” (“Old World Roots/ New World Realities” 10). Over 30 years later, comparatists know that Fitz was only half right.

Ideas of the Decade

Untranslatability

Shaden Tageldin

Impasse and imposture—if not sheer impossibility—haunt the dream of translatability. If translatability has underpinned “efforts to revive World Literature” within and against the discipline of comparative literature over the last decade (3), as Emily Apter has argued in Against World Literature (2013), surely its obverse—untranslatability—is a ghostwritten word of that decade and a watchword of the next.

Ideas of the Decade

The End of Languages?

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

I think the emphasis on languages is getting less and less important as the corporatized university goes toward globalized uniformity. The coming together of comparative literary studies and the social science methodologies that we had hoped for a decade ago seems to have dissipated into various fundable directions, courting international civil society directions rather than research methods. Language learning has also become instrumental to human rights work. In this way, the focused discipline of comparative literature has undergone transformations that may not be always to the good.

Ideas of the Decade

Philology

Timothy Brennan

As a term “philology” in comparative literature has been, over the last decade, attacked, extolled, distorted, appropriated, diluted, and wielded as a club. Assumed to be antique, it never goes away, in part because it is at the heart of Marxist literary theory and anticolonial thought.

Ideas of the Decade

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Rita Felski

“The hermeneutics of suspicion” does not just describe the recent history of criticism; it redescribes it, giving us a fresh slant on the state of the field. The phrase signals a shift away from the broad philosophical or political questions associated with “theory” to a new concern with the specifics of method: how and why we read.

Ideas of the Decade

The "Middle East" and/or The "Global" (!) War on Terror

Ipshita Chanda

This submission unpacks the phrases "Middle East" and "Global War on Terror" and opposes their status as ideas of the decade .

Ideas of the Decade

Neoliberalism

Snehal Shingavi

David Harvey lays out the two primary ways that neoliberalism has been understood: “We can, therefore, interpret neoliberalism either as a utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism or as a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore power of economic elites … The evidence suggests, moreover, that when neoliberal principles clash with the need to restore or sustain elite power, then the principles are either abandoned or become so twisted as to be unrecognizable."

Ideas of the Decade

Periodization

Adam Miyashiro

Critical examinations of how “periodization" shaped ideas of time and space through “antiquity” and “the Middle Ages" contextualizes the foundations of literary fields alongside the emergence of European nationalisms and empires. These studies have had broad implications for other fields, including postcolonial theory, transnational studies, and globalization studies, and shows us how a historical period, such as “medieval,” can signify anxieties about Western "secular modernity” in its relationship to South America, Asia, and Africa.

Ideas of the Decade

Fundamentalism

Mohammad Salama

Thematic questions about fundamentalism have recently proliferated in Arabic literature. One major theme is the aspiration to expose dominant religious radicalism and to win back the freedom of expression suppressed by the hegemonic ideologies of postcolonialism.