Decolonizing Comparative Literature

Abstract

This essay seeks to contribute to ongoing debates about disciplinary decolonization in Comparative Literature by urging scholars and students to return to the literature and theory of twentieth-century anticolonial liberation struggles. I begin by considering the relationship of Comparative Literature as it is currently practised in the metropolitan academy to earlier projects of cultural decolonization, focusing particularly on the contrast between the depoliticized ‘worlding’ of the discipline and the more radical and purposeful comparative praxis demonstrated by the Afro-Asian Writers' Association's literary journal Lotus (1968–91). I then turn to examples of literary criticism by two major fiction writers, theorists and party activists with ties to Lotus: Ghassan Kanafani (Palestine, 1936–72) and Alex La Guma (South Africa, 1924–85). Putting their work into conversation enables us to challenge the distance from organized struggle that most contemporary criticism maintains, while also developing our understanding of the conditions, principles, and tactics of what Kanafani famously called adab al-muqāwama, or resistance literature, a concept that any attempt to decolonize Comparative Literature cannot do without.