Net Work: Area Studies, Comparison, and Connectivity

Abstract

Area studies and world literature share a spirit of comparison, despite their distinct historical formations in cold war tactics of knowledge for power and the flurry of globalization theory that accompanied the neoliberal 1990s vision of open market as world stage, and notwithstanding recent critical narratives that cleave area studies' particularized zones of specialized, philologically deep knowledge from world literature's globe-spanning yet difference-erasing ambition. That spirit will not speak in these brief remarks, nor can I promise a report, readable or otherwise, to one disciplinary field (the comparative) from any other field (e.g., area studies). Area studies was always comparative. It emerged alongside a host of comparative methodologies whose slicing spatial divisions (continents, spheres of influences, West/East) and stealth temporal ladders (civilization, modernity, development) later comparatists of the literary-critical persuasion may question but whose gestures we are perhaps condemned to repeat in cutting the globe to new spatio-temporal measures. The task is not to redress historical error in the name of comparison (as if the verbal sense of discipline was intended and comparative literature could complete area studies) but rather to re-cognize comparison, which we are always learning how to do, through the remembrance of area studies' ambitions and omissions.