April 23, 2014

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.

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.

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.