Introduction: Comparative Studies in a Precarious Present

Abstract

"In 2019, the Association Canadienne de Littérature Comparée/Canadian Comparative Literature Association (ACLC/CCLA) gathered at the University of British Columbia to determine how comparative literary scholars have been forced to “pivot” amid the overlapping circles of knowledge that have emerged in recent years.... Consistent with the annual theme of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences/Fédération des Sciences Humaines in 2019, “Circles of Conversation,” we explored the circle as an important metaphor of power as demonstrated by the existence of academic boundaries, centres and peripheries, exclusions, and forms of inequality. While acknowledging Tilottama Rajan’s forewarning about the onset of the coming hegemony of academic 'culturalism,' we recognize something in literary study that remains critically attuned to these changes, a kind of listening ear on the present that may indeed signal the potential for a critique of those hegemonies. Some may even argue that literary study is urgently needed in times of destabilization, such as the one we are experiencing now. Comparative Literature, then, which is part of literary study, belongs to a collective effort of responding to the larger crisis by navigating its own internal crisis; and, as an inevitable result of this process, of staking a claim for its continued existence."