This workshop explores the promise and challenges of South-South comparativism. By critically examining the histories, repertoires, and methods of South-South exchange, solidarities, and comparison, the workshop aims to assess how this paradigm reconfigures the geographies of comparison, as well as its epistemological and political grounds. Our approach seeks to move beyond traditional binaries of center and periphery, to encompass cross-regional dialogues across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East, as well as comparisons within regions and traditions. What determines which regions, texts, or traditions are brought into dialogue, and how do these choices shape the narratives and frameworks we produce? Participants are encouraged to explore the modalities of producing and interrelating literatures/literary approaches that have emerged and are still emerging within the Global South as alternatives to the theories and practices of comparative literature in Euro-America, which have for a long time dominated literary notions and sensibilities as well as the practices of reading, contextualizing, and theorizing.

The two-day workshop will be organized into four small workshops. The first two will examine the legacies of Afro-Asianism and South-South exchanges; the third workshop will turn attention to the archives and repertoires of South-South comparison; and the final workshop will more directly interrogate the question of comparative methodology, as shaped by the work discussed in the first three workshops.

The complete program will follow.

supported by:

Einstein-Stitung, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung, Austrian Academy of Sciences