Comparing the Literatures of the Global South

Can a non-Eurocentric comparative literature be imagined? Historically and epistemologically, comparative literature began, and has largely remained, a subset of European studies. The very ideas of “comparison” and “literature” have a well-known nineteenth-century provenance, invested in nationalism, scientific positivism and geopolitical rivalry manifested in nation-and empire-building projects. Forays of the discipline into other parts of the world in recent decades have for the most part been undertaken from a firmly European, or Euro-US, base. Postcolonial studies put a new twist on this centrality by breaking up one side of orientalism’s East-West dichotomy but has otherwise preserved the other pole as a necessary point of reference, a nameable antagonist. As a critique of colonial representation, discourse and epistemology, postcolonial studies - as its name signifies - could not do without the centrality of the West, if only in the form of a reverse Eurocentrism. A shift in perspective from Eurocentric paradigms, including the vertical North-South axis, to interregional, or cross-regional, South-South relations can, in principle, bypass both the centrality of (post)colonial relations and their monolingual spheres (the Anglophone, the Francophone, the Hispanophone, the Lusophone) to advance the project of decolonizing knowledge.