{"title":"The Need for a Black Planetarity","authors":"Richard Purcell","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0244","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:\"The Need for a Black Planetarity\" connects Gayatri Spivak's revitalization of the project of comparative literature in Death of a Discipline to her analysis of virtual capitalism and urbanity across a range of her works, including \"Megacity\" and Harlem. This constellation of works, the author argues, illuminates untrodden thematic connections within Spivak's writing that reveal the importance of her figuration of \"planetarity\" in Death of a Discipline to our own contemporary struggles within and beyond the academy that draws us further away from the reading and teaching of the \"textual\" as a place of alterity.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"60 1","pages":"244 - 252"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46009069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Other Knows Best","authors":"B. Baer","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0234","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article reflects on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Death of a Discipline (2003) twenty years after its first publication. The discipline of Comparative Literature was not reborn in line with Spivak's elegiac imperatives. Yet Death of a Discipline's argument—that literary reading may affirm a certain vagueness and non-knowledge in the outlines of alterity—remains a compelling resource in a world of STEM, calculable probability, and the power of averages. In excess of its topical institutional intervention, Death of a Discipline indicates a range of enveloping generalities that both contain and make room for the future development of new practices in the Humanities. These point beyond the politics of identity and the power of an ideological average, suggesting work to come.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"60 1","pages":"234 - 243"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45013918","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fellow Travelers: How Road Stories Shaped the Idea of the Americas","authors":"Antonio Barrenechea","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0418","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45533582","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Singular Unverifiability","authors":"G. Walker","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0253","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0253","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Death of a Discipline powerfully linked the social-institutional conditions of literary reflection to the category of the geopolitical, in the hopes of a renewal of Comparative Literature, whose earlier aims at their best had been to shelter the international possibility of humanistic thought beyond the border. Yet, this discipline has often remained trapped by the only partial universality of its function, substituting for the world a microcosm of convivial European multilingualism and ambition of scope. Twenty years after its publication, Death of a Discipline notably upheld a space for the \"singular unverifiability\" that marks Comparative Literature at its best – not only the singularity of the written line, and the unverifiability of the reading of the literary text, but also the singular and the unverifiable as warnings against the positivist culturalism of the older area studies. In this sense, it must be taken as a profoundly affirmative text that still offers a vision of a genuine intellectual-institutional alternative: to open the theoretical humanities to the remote and fragile thinking of a genuine encounter with planetarity.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"60 1","pages":"253 - 262"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42498021","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
G. Spivak, E. Apter, Pheng Cheah, B. Edwards, David Golumbia
{"title":"To My Questioners: Alphabetically Listed by Last Name","authors":"G. Spivak, E. Apter, Pheng Cheah, B. Edwards, David Golumbia","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0204","url":null,"abstract":"Editor’s note: This written interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was conducted by Emily Apter, Pheng Cheah, Brent Hayes Edwards, and David Golumbia in December 2022 and January 2023. Spivak’s answers to Apter’s questions appear first, followed by Spivak’s responses to questions from Cheah, Edwards, and Golumbia. Apter suggested the first set of italicized topic headings. To provide consistency, I added topic headings to the sections of the interview that follow. —Nergis Ertürk","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"60 1","pages":"204 - 233"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41923921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Most Mexican of Us All: Yiddish Modernism and the Racial Politics of National Belonging","authors":"R. Grossman","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0282","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0282","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article investigates how Yiddish writing in Mexico illuminates the ambiguous position of Jews both within their local context and as part of a global network of Yiddish modernist writers. Through an analysis of the poetry of two Jewish immigrants to Mexico, Yitzjok (Isaac) Berliner (1899–1957) and Jacobo Glantz (1902–1982), this article argues that these immigrant poets adopted local themes and styles characteristic of Mexican modernism as a way to rhetorically write Jews into the nation. Although Mexican modernist literature and art was most typically expressed in Spanish, these poets took on local forms but preserved Jewish difference by writing in Yiddish. At the same time, Berliner and Glantz also engaged with a global, diasporic network of Yiddish modernism centered in New York and Warsaw. Focusing on the so-called \"Mexican\" subject matter enabled these poets to participate in a larger conversation about expanding the boundaries of Yiddish literature, proposing the literature's worldliness by speaking beyond an explicitly Jewish experience. The works of these immigrant writers, therefore, demonstrate the emergence of a Third Space at the intersection not only of the immigrant and the nation, but also between the periphery and the centers of a transnational Yiddish network.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"60 1","pages":"282 - 311"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43116334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Toward Weaving/Reading Hemispheric Land And Literature","authors":"Laurel Sturgis O’Coyne","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0374","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0374","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:To what extent can the phenomena of métissage and mestizaje be read as intersecting threads of a multilingual, hemispheric American story? And what do their divergences and convergences contribute to a discourse of comparison? This paper argues that métissage and mestizaje relate nonequivalent theories of wovenness in their local contexts and in relation to transnational decolonial praxes. This paper reads a resignification of mestizaje in Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) that both embraces hybridity and reinstates a linear, teleological—and settler colonial—theory of materialities. By contrast, the narration in Gisèle Pineau's memorial novel L'Exil selon Julia (1996) invokes métissage as a body-place wovenness through her grandmother Julia's Antillean Creole orality, locating a kincentric ecological literacy in her relations with her beloved jardin créole. This paper then weaves these two readings together with Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony (1977)—which, although activated neither by métissage nor mestizaje, narrates a common theory of woven matter-energy relationality in the Pueblo language and cosmology that structure Silko's English language text. Weaving/reading hemispheric land and literature proposes a critical turning toward place-based literariness, engages multispecies kinship ontologies, and ultimately orients comparison toward kinetic theories of wovenness and with a responsibility to narrative and material story-weavings of the hemisphere.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"60 1","pages":"374 - 396"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47565690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Death of a Discipline and the Task of Worlding","authors":"Anirban Bhattacharjee","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0274","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0274","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:The article attempts to examine and understand how Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Death of a Discipline tackles with the task of worlding in its vision of a new geo-politics, signalling a future anterior and imagining a planetary comparative criticism. It underscores that a productive undoing of the aesthetic can possibilize a reflexive rearrangement of desires in a regime of capitalist globalization. It spotlights how the ethics and politics of translation in Spivak might resonate with her imperatives for the \"necessary impossibility\" of imagining the subject as planetary. Travelling with the text, as one moves onto the margins, calls for a reconfiguration of the pedagogical relations in the classroom of instructor and student, in terms of learning, expertise, authority and otherness fundamentally rearranged, creating the conditions of possibility for developing democratic reflexes and \"learning to learn from below.\" This insinuates the question and necessity of a supplemental pedagogy and, correspondingly, a training of the imagination for \"literary reading\" producing a flexible epistemology that can, perhaps, undo the crisis and sustain the will to social justice. Reclaiming the role of teaching literature, attending to the from-below interruption of the discipline, it asks and inquires, if the notion of the \"literary\" and the \"figure\" of the \"planet\" come up with a radical openness to the inappropriable other, quietly working as an unerasable principle of transformability inherent to the world.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"60 1","pages":"274 - 281"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46387053","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spivak's Death of a Discipline: An Anthropologist Tries to Respond","authors":"Rosalind C. Morris","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0263","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0263","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article explores Spivak's long-standing engagement with anthropology, and reads Death of a Discipline as the third volume of a trilogy encompassing A Critique of Postcolonial Reason and Imperatives to Reimagine the Planet. In treating DoD as the third and \"pragmatic\" supplement to the first two texts, it explores the ways in which Spivak's thought engages the problems bequeathed by Immanuel Kant's own critical trilogy: the native informant, the regulatory ideal and cosmopolitical ethics, and the need to supplement the concept of \"world\" (or \"globality\") with a non-substantive intuition of the transcendental in the form of the earth and/or the planetary.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"60 1","pages":"263 - 273"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45984780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Death of a Discipline and the Imperatives of Comparatism","authors":"Nergis Ertürk","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0195","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Introducing the forum on the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Gayatri Spivak's Death of a Discipline, this essay addresses the implications of Spivak's book for the historical present.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"60 1","pages":"195 - 203"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47797689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}