Comparative studies are haunted by Eurocentric legacies and the assimilationist logic of globalization. Doing comparative work often means facing a wide range of “a violent severing, a forced fusion, a deadly contest of forces” (Bachner 2023). Not only is comparison never neutral, it is also often organized around hierarchical structures and the binary of Us and Them. Some have critically questioned the institutions, language, and categories of European modernity as foundations for today’s comparative practices (Mignolo 2013). But even then, “decolonial” or “critical” comparative studies cannot easily delink itself from imperial epistemology. Others have proposed concepts such as “untranslatability” (Apter 2014) and “incommunicability” (Briggs 2024) as ethical correctives to false universals. However, equity without relationality is again susceptible to pitfalls of isolationism and incommensurability. Taking the double bind of equity and relationality as our point of departure, how can we proceed with our comparative project unapologetically?

Scholars have faced the unavoidable limitations of comparative thought while trying to recover its critical potentials. Moon-Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas, for example, argue for the incommensurability of antiblackness in comparison with other forms of racism, gesturing unapologetically toward a radical critique (2022). More-than-human studies, informed by posthumanism and object-oriented ontologies, have engaged with the unbridgeable distance between human and non-human others to further critique anthropocentrism. Scholars have embraced anthropomorphism to explain animal behaviors or explored “representational forms that go beyond language” (Kohn 2015). 

If comparative studies, in Radhakrishnan’s words, aim “to result in the production of new and destabilizing knowledge” (2013), what does “good” and un/apologetic comparison look like today? What are our strategies to account for and critically engage the imperial genealogies at the core of comparative studies? Rather than holding the potential violence of comparison at bay, what if we follow Bachner’s approach and embrace it instead? What risks can we take and afford as comparatists today? This seminar calls for critical (self-)reflections on methods drawing from specific and situated comparative practices. We welcome papers that re-envision comparative methodologies within and beyond literary studies proper and established disciplinary models. We are especially interested in approaches from but not limited to animal studies, medical humanities, media studies, science and technology studies (STS), Blackness and Indigenity, gender and sexuality, and minor transnationalism.