(This event was organised by MEI’s Arabia-Asia Research Cluster, as part of its monthly seminar series.)

Abstract

One of the primary shortcomings in comparative literary studies is that despite calls to think along planetary lines, the discipline remains beholden to a model of core and periphery. Meaning, literatures and cultures from non-Western countries are put in dialogue with those from the West. We might ask, what can be gained from shifting the terms of comparative analysis? What might be learned by thinking along different lines – not center and periphery, the Middle East and Europe or the Middle East and the United States – but instead, horizontal lines of comparison, South/South (in our current understanding of the Global South as a term)? These questions demand that we also ask what new tensions we might encounter when changing the structure of the conversation in this way. This talk took the form of a workshop in which participants looked at a sample of short readings from Arabic literary texts (in translation) that write the East, both from the premodern tradition and the modern novel. Through these texts, they tried to arrive at an interpretation of the particular types of alterity that are constituted by literary representations of the parts of Asia considered decidedly unfamiliar within the Arab/Islamic world. Among the questions considered were: What are the primary modes of identity at work in these texts? Is there a way to read these representations diachronically, inside history? What do they reveal about the potentialities and/or difficulties of future comparative work outside of the core/periphery model?