It has been 65 years since the Czech-American Rene Wellek brewed a crisis in the
disciplinary discourses of Comparative Literature. Ever since, almost all Comparatists are forced to take a stand for or against this elephant in the classrooms. Various ACLA Reports (Levin 1965, Green 1975, Bernheimer 1993, Saussy 2014 and Heise 2024) have all been, in one way or another, an apology for the in-disciplinarity, or even anti-disciplinarity, of
this so-called discipline.
Comparative Literature(s) in India have been no different, as the scholars find themselves
caught between the disciplinary battles among Cultural Studies, Dalit Studies, Gender Studies, Minority Studies, Translation Studies and Visual Studies, to name a few, and, of course, the Social Sciences. Still, no one seems to have stopped to ask, whose crisis are we carrying? Is this a Euro-American crisis forced upon us, or have we encountered our own crisis? If yes, then what are they? Is ‘crisis’ necessarily negative? Isn’t lack of crisis that stagnates the discipline, making it redundant? If disciplines are anyway historical formations, then, what does the never-ending debate on the disciplinarity of the discipline based on some ‘origin’ entail? Shouldn’t we rather be exploring the many ‘beginnings’ of the praxis? That is to conceive Comparative Literature as not something that originated in
Euro-America and then came to India, but to reconceive it as a practice that has parallel
beginnings across the world. That is nothing but to decolonize Comparative Literature(s) of India.
‘In-comparative’ is a framework we propose to make sense of the very many incomparable
spatial and temporal experiences, languages, literatures, cultures, communities and
civilizations of ‘India.’ Emily Apter has already drawn attention to ‘un-understandability,’
‘untranslatability’ and ‘incomparativity’ as theoretical constructs, along with Eric
Auerbach’s notion of ‘unGoethean’: “to critique the form of non-cosmopolitan World Literature or standardized literary monoculture” that nationalized itself. No wonder then
James Porter hailed Eric Auerbach as the father of incomparative literature! But that is also to assert that literatures of India are always already in comparative as well asincomparative.
Here, ‘in,’ like in Alain Badiou’s ‘inaesthetics,’ or Jacques Derrida’s ‘im-possibility,’ is not a negation, but an irreducible divisibility that affects the very essence of comparison, its lack of coevality and concomitant equivocality. In-comparative is to critically deconstruct the binary pitfalls that comparison has fallen into. In-comparative is also to resurrect comparison as insurrection, as critique, and not just finding the commonality that binds
together. It is to reach (for) the being-in-common rather than continue to search for a
common being. It is to deterritorialize, even absolutely, without reterritorializing despite territorial boundedness.
These are not some abstract crises that are imposed on Comparative Literature from
outside. They have emerged from the research happening in Comparative Literature and
allied disciplines in India. When the existing disciplinary discourses are insufficient to
address the questions and frameworks that animate and worry the actual works, it is
probably time to pause and unthink ‘in-disciplinarity.’
Please submit Abstracts of about 500 words by 29 December 2024.
- MT Ansari
ansarimt@gmail.com
