Comparing Literatures in Canada: Joseph Pivato and the Postculture of Disappearance

Abstract

A response to Giulia de Gasperi and Joseph Pivato, eds. Comparative Literature for the New Century (McGill-Queen's UP, 2018). "De Gasperi and Pivato’s volume provides a welcome opportunity to take stock of where Comparative Literature is at in Canada and to demonstrate the utility of proceeding comparatively, which I do here by situating the volume vis-à-vis the ACLA’s most recent (2014-15/2017) state-of-the-discipline report and then by considering whether Comparative Literature in Canada might be experiencing what one might call, in good comparatist tradition, a “culture of disappearance” moment. In drawing on Ackbar Abbas’s seminal text about Hong Kong culture in relation to the Handover of 1997, I probe what it is about comparatists that makes us cultural seismographers, sensitive to how cultural works reveal the shifting grounds beneath us, and what it is about proceeding comparatively that brings into focus the unsettling conjuncture of crisis and futurity."