I want to begin by thanking the editors of the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and particularly Ato Quayson and Adwoa Opoku-Agyemang, for putting together this forum of responses to my 2017 ACLA presidential address. And I want to thank Ali Behdad, David Damrosch, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, and Jeanne-Marie Jackson for their thoughtful reflections, responses, and rebuttals. I am honored that they took the time to engage with my provocation so carefully and gratified that they have taken some of the issues I raised in my essay in so many interesting and different directions. The variety of their responses answers implicitly and affirmatively the basic rhetorical question of my address: Does it matter where we are comparing from? I offer here some concise thoughts provoked by each of their responses.

Jeanne-Marie Jackson addresses the issue of “doing justice to literature” with which I closed my presidential address. As she says, I left the question of what it means to do justice to literature open-ended. I did so in part, as I noted in the essay, because Harry Levin, in his 1968 ACLA address, left us with a terrible (and patently false) dilemma: doing justice to European literatures, he intimated, necessarily entailed the exclusion of African and other languages and literatures from the purview of American comparative literature. Thus, if “doing justice” to some literature meant also doing injustice to other literatures, I wondered, then what are we doing and what do we mean when we frame literary studies as a training in ethics (Which ethics? Whose?) and as a form of doing justice—to literatures, languages, and people(s)? This has been a relatively constant way to frame the aim and impulse of comparative literature, at least by the evidence of ACLA presidential addresses, in so many of which the awkward phrase “doing justice” recurs over the years as a leitmotif. Whether this is because comparative literature as a discipline seems to attract people who care especially about matters of justice or because our scholarly sensibilities mean that we have to work endlessly through the inaugural questions that launched the project of comparative literature in the United States, I cannot say. The other reason I left the question open-ended was because I do not think there is some stable, transcendent notion of justice that can be done to, or even “with,” literature. Like the act of comparison itself, as I argue in my address, doing justice to literature is also situational. At times, Jackson notes, it means giving V.S. Naipaul his due. Thus, as Jackson concludes, “‘doing justice’ demands different temperaments at different times, and in different forums.”

I will say more about the term forum in the following, because, indeed, forum matters, as much for doing justice as for doing comparative literature. My primary critique of Franco Moretti’s comparative practice in “Conjectures on World Literature” is not that he provides “ill-contextualized footnote[s],” as Jackson suggests. Rather, ill-contextualized footnotes are a symptom of the more fundamental problem that he fails to take any account of the historical circumstances of the forums—by which I mean everything from the literal location of publication to the epistemological condition of the historical academic universe—in which the literary comparisons that he now treats merely as data were originally made. Abstracted from their original locations of comparison, which were shot through with all sorts of personal, professional, ideological, and political contingencies, literary comparisons that may have been strategic (or otherwise motivated) in their own time become mere comparisons, taking on the appearance of plain fact. Shifting particular comparisons from one forum to another (as Moretti does when he extracts comparisons from 1960s’ Africanist arguments that helped to establish the legitimacy of African literary studies and re-enlists them to support a generalized model of world literature forty years later) may mean that such comparisons, not “move[d] according to a law of their own,” no longer “describe reality, not even falsely,” as Roberto Schwarz says of “misplaced ideas.”Footnote ¹

In her response, Jackson distinguishes between notions of doing justice to literature and doing justice through it, which, she rightly says, are too often conflated, confusing an ethical attitude toward literature with a political attitude toward society, which the literary text might be conscripted to address. I fully agree with her point, especially when it comes to “textual objects from parts of the world often prized more than others for their ‘use value’ . . . . in advancing what seem like justice-seeking methodologies.” One version of such practices I have taken to calling “forum shopping,” after the legal practice most notoriously associated with multinational corporations, whose multinationality enables them to seek out a court and a legal system that seem likeliest to deliver the plaintiff a favorable judgment. The practice is also used by intellectual property lawyers on behalf of their clients, often multinational pharmaceutical companies, who pursue patents on knowledge that is common or traditional in one location by filing an intellectual property claim in another national jurisdiction where the knowledge may be unknown, or, in the language of patent law, “novel and non-obvious.” Forum shopping involves opportunistic comparison, but not of knowledges, original creations, or intellectual productions. Rather, it involves tactical comparisons of the relative strengths and weaknesses of particular legal forums, making a calculated choice of law by weighing the costs and advantages of pursuing an argument in one jurisdiction against another. In that sense, the search for “justice” (the attempt to choose the laws by which one will be judged) often represents a cynical effort to escape someone else’s justice elsewhere.

To shift from the field of jurisprudence to that of literary studies, I am using the legal concept of forum shopping to name a comparative literary practice, all too common in the era of globalized literary studies, of scholars seeking out texts, genres, and authors from elsewhere (often from historically marginal or marginalized locations) to serve as literary data for the purposes of making sweeping claims about literature or about some phenomenon that occurred to the scholar primarily from reading canonical texts of world literature or some major national literature in Europe and North America—that is, already well-recognized in the centers of global academic power and the World Republic of Letters. In general, forum shopping could characterize any argument that selectively enlists a literary text or scholarship to fit a thesis, rather than letting the thesis itself emerge organically from a body of texts, but I am more interested in a specific power dynamic that sanctions the data mining of literature and scholarship from (and about) the global south for metropolitan purposes, reducing those works to a simple evidentiary “use value.” Moretti’s distant reading of the archives of comparative literature scholarship from the global “peripheries” strikes me as forum shopping because he was looking for evidence to confirm his (thesis about) power at the center while ignoring the historicity of the forums in which that scholarship first appeared—or, in fact, the power of the center in shaping the terms (and necessity) of those comparisons in the first place.

Forum shopping is part of the neo-imperialist extractive economy of much world literature, transnational, or global whatever scholarship that has been institutionalized by the new MLA forum structure. Indeed, by the logic of the new MLA forums (which reformed the old, largely nation-based divisions system), we are all global now. So, for example, someone writing a book on world detective novels might poke around with impunity in the field of Chinese literature for a novel exhibiting features that the author wants to claim are central to the genre, features identified in older standard texts that are then “discovered” in noncanonical texts from other locations. Indeed, it seems that any book on nearly any literary topic of contemporary social interest today requires at least a gestural chapter on ethnic minority literature or texts from the global south, no matter the scholar’s linguistic competence or field of training—Anglophone authors such as Rushdie, Roy, Ishiguro, and Coetzee can always be called up for metonymic duty. In his response, David Damrosch refers to the similar practice of entering someone else’s “well-tended fields to pick up new supplies” as carpet-bagging, but forum shopping also entails transferring those supplies back to a “home” jurisdiction in order to be judged according to its norms and knowledge—that is, in order not to be judged according to the alien norms and knowledge of those who have been tending their fields well for some time. It is, at minimum, poor scholarly practice because what looks like innovation in one literary subfield may well appear tired, uninformed, false, dilettantish, or purely opportunistic in another. Literary forum shopping takes advantage of scholarship (often by area or regional specialists) and literature from outside the historical orbit of a given traditional literary subfield in order to give a thesis, or the field itself, the imprimatur of “global” or “cosmopolitan,” along with more than a whiff of the exotic.

Sometimes such forum shopping is construed as “doing justice” to relatively marginalized literatures through hubristic acts of salvage comparison that pull long-neglected (or once-rejected) texts and scholarship from historically marginalized locations into the orbit of world literature or some other globalizing disciplinary formation. For Susan Stanford Friedman, such pursuits are “recovery” operations, part of a “transformational planetary epistemology” needed to make modernist studies new.Footnote ² Thus, Friedman urges modernists to begin “locating buried and forgotten texts in the global archive of languages,” “digging [in] . . . other modernities outside the familiar Western ones.”Footnote ³ Despite the rhetoric of inclusion, such practices often have little, in fact, to do with doing justice to so-called “forgotten” or marginalized literatures; rather, as I argued in my address, salvage comparison usually has less to do with unearthing “buried” literature and more to do with repositioning it in order to burnish the global credentials, authority, and institutional prestige of a field that previously rejected inclusive comparative claims from the periphery based on protective and parochial criteria of exclusion.

I do not want to be misunderstood; I applaud the fact that some of the more conservative literary fields have begun lowering their blinders to adopt a more global perspective, but in the scramble for the globe they need not repeat the original sin of imperialism upon which their traditional fields are historically based: imagining the rest of the world as terrae nullius, or litterae nullius. Forum shopping for a literary example upon which to hang a preformed argument is clearly not a new phenomenon, and my own fields of third world, postcolonial, or global south literatures are not innocent in this respect. Indeed, the current professional imperative to redescribe, redefine, or reframe a literary field, problem, or genre means that almost all of us do it at one point or another. No less a respected thinker than the Scottish philosopher David Hume engaged in such unprincipled practices when, in 1753, he appended to his 1748 essay “Of National Characters” an infamous footnote outlining his suspicion that “the negroes, and in general all the other species of men” are “naturally inferior to the whites.”Footnote ⁴ In his final edition of the essay in 1777, Hume narrowed his profanation of “other species of men” to “negroes” alone, insisting that “[t]here scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no art, no science.”Footnote ⁵ To support his racist contention, Hume turned to an obscene comparison in an effort to undermine the Enlightenment equation between literacy and liberty, or to deny literary production as a sign of humanity and civilization for one part of the human population: “In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.”Footnote ⁶

Forum shopping in the plantation colonies, Hume encountered the story of Francis Williams, the son of free Jamaican blacks who attended Cambridge University in the 1720s as part of an educational “experiment” conducted by the philanthropic Duke of Montagu to determine if “a Negroe might not be found as capable of literature as a white person.”Footnote ⁷ Williams returned to Jamaica, founded a school for black children, and composed at least one occasional ode in Latin celebrating the inauguration of a new governor of the island, which became a touchstone of early comparative literary debate and polemics about slavery in the Atlantic world. As Simon Gikandi has argued, “[f]or Hume, the most obvious sign of black inferiority was aesthetic lack and a general incapacity in the realm of taste,”Footnote ⁸ and he needed to discredit any evidence to the contrary in order to safeguard his gut suspicion. Indeed, the ethical, political, and humanitarian stakes of literary comparison could not have been higher because proslavery and abolitionist lobbies, not surprisingly, divided over the question and possibility of African authorship.

Edward Long, in his History of Jamaica (1774), took up Hume’s calumnious allegation as a challenge to demonstrate that Williams was a “parrot” (or a plagiarist) rather than an author; Long printed the only extant example of Williams’s poetry and compared it to “several passages in the classic [Latin] authors, to which he seems to have been indebted, or to have had allusion.”Footnote ⁹ Rather than read allusion as an obvious sign of belonging to a literary community or to humanity, Long interpreted it according to the racist codes of his day as a sign of inferiority and illicit behavior. If, as Charles Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr. have argued, eighteenth-century “slave narrative[s] arose as a response to and refutation of claims that blacks could not write,”Footnote ¹⁰ the charge of plagiarism arose immediately in response to the mounting evidence that they could. That charge depended upon an insidious (and superficial) literary comparison that pretended to be aimed at doing justice—a phrase that Long himself uses repeatedly in his proslavery tract. In an effort to demonstrate to English readers that Williams was merely a mimic and, therefore, showed no more literary genius than what “we might expect from a middling scholar at the seminaries of Westminster or Eaton,”Footnote ¹¹ Long translated Williams’s poem from Latin in order to perform his abjecting comparison. Wanting to appear open-minded and even-handed, Long claimed to be concerned with matters of social and literary justice: of evaluating Hume’s prejudiced opinions fairly; of doing “all possible justice” to Williams himself;Footnote ¹² and of avoiding “doing injustice to the original” with an English translation of Williams’s poem that “retain[ed] the sense” of the Latin ode.Footnote ¹³ Despite the rhetorical framing, Long’s conclusion is foregone, clearly implying that his comparative method confirms Hume’s suspicion.

Edward Said famously argued that “Orientalism is after all a system for citing works and authors,”Footnote ¹⁴ and the vicious citational circularity between Long and Hume provides a paradigmatic example of the analogous feedback loop of colonial discourse and racism more generally. Ironically, perhaps, given Long’s concern with original thinking and forms of self-expression, Hume doubled down on his claim about black inferiority in the last revision to his footnote in 1777, three years after Long published his extended literary comparison, which itself seems to have been spurred by Hume’s racist footnote from 1753 in the first place.Footnote ¹⁵ Long’s insidious comparison shows exactly the “asymmetry and incomparability” that Souleymane Bachir Diagne says colonial space is built upon. Indeed, in his response to my address, Diagne refers obliquely to Hume’s footnote and to Long’s exclusionary comparison when he writes about Abbé Henri Grégoire as one of “the true founders of comparative literature as humanism.” In his seminal abolitionist literary study, De la littérature des nègres ou recherches sur leurs facultés intellectuelles, leurs qualités morales et leur littérature. Suivi de notices sur la vie et les ouvrages des nègres qui se sont distingués dans les sciences, les lettres et les arts (1808), Abbé Grégoire reprinted Long’s annotated version of Williams’s poem in full in order to refute the charge that “the author [i]s a plagiarist” and to “prove” that “the negroes are capable of virtues and talents.”Footnote ¹⁶ Because “[t]he colonial space, by definition, cannot be a space of comparison,” Diagne argues, “[t]o think otherwise, to dare compare,” as Abbé Grégoire does, “is indeed an act of decolonization.”

Although the circumstances were clearly different in the 1960s, when Emmanuel Obiechina and Abiola Irele were comparing European-language African literatures to European literatures, they, too, were “pioneers . . . of comparative literature as humanism,” in the sense that Diagne describes. I have no doubt that both Obiechina and Irele felt they were decolonizing the field of comparative literature and doing justice both to and through African literatures with their inclusive comparisons. Nevertheless, we should also be willing to acknowledge the injustice, or disservice, that was done to African literature at the same time, when, for reasons that were not entirely intrinsic to the literature itself, such strategic, humanistic comparisons were being made in an effort to secure a future for African literature. The asymmetry of world literary space made such decolonizing comparisons necessary, if not inevitable, which is one of the historical facts that Moretti and others ignore when they treat such acts of comparison as simple matters of digging up similarities between literary texts. For these reasons, any notion of doing justice to and through literature must also be understood within the historical framework and forum that motivated any given literary comparison in its own time and place.

Diagne’s argument about decolonizing acts of comparison follows from a strict definition of the verb compare: “to put on par with, to create equality.” Most common uses of the term are not so careful in highlighting the proposition of equality, and so it becomes necessary to distinguish between equalizing, inclusive practices of comparison and insidious, abjecting acts of comparison. Indeed, the double edge of comparison is evident in reading Diagne’s response alongside Ali Behdad’s, which argues that “the comparative method itself is the critical factor enabling the discipline’s persistent Eurocentricity and its inability to treat non-Western literary traditions as equal to their European counterparts.” Or, as R. Radhakrishnan has written, “Behind the seeming generosity of comparison, there always lurks the aggression of a [tendentious] thesis.”Footnote ¹⁷ Such aggressive comparison, motivated by an ulterior thesis, is precisely the sort practiced by Edward Long in his effort to discredit the abolitionist argument that black writing is comparable to white. For Behdad, the comparative method that undergirds contemporary comparative literature is itself wholly compromised by these historical imperialist uses. Indeed, imperialism (and other forms of racism and social discrimination and exploitation) is unthinkable without this sort of hierarchizing, discriminatory comparison: the rationalizing, taxonomizing drive of the European Enlightenment powered imperial projects that compared “cultures” in order to elaborate evolutionary models of languages, nations, and peoples in which non-European instances were relegated to some primitive stage in human development. Thus, “non-European [literary] traditions,” as Behdad notes, were taken to “represent earlier stages in a progressive narrative of literary production.” Sadly, this same gambit of exclusionary comparison (which claimed that there was little worthy of the name “literature” among peoples outside of Europe because such forms of creative expression either were inherently inferior or were merely debased copies of European originals) informed much of the historical dismissal of non-European literatures from comparative literature and other traditional field formations in the literature departments of the global north through at least the late twentieth century.

Between Behdad and Diagne arises the constant question of decolonization: Are the master’s tools of comparison so compromised by their use in constructing systems and institutions of domination, hierarchy, and myths of superiority that they cannot be redeemed, or might they be reimplemented as part of a strenuous effort to reform those systems and to redirect their energies toward the goal of real justice? Behdad seems to agree with Audre Lorde, and in many ways he suggests that practices like those that I have been calling forum shopping are merely extensions of older forms of imperial expropriation and exploitation: “[i]f we continue to use the comparative method without fully attending to the cultural and ideological assumptions that undergird it,” he warns, “literatures from the Western periphery will continue to remain in an essential sense marginal in comparative literature—even as those texts come to be incorporated into the field.” For Behdad and Diagne, decolonization clearly remains an unfinished task for comparative literature, which is in striking contrast to the sense that we have already decolonized that emerges from the story that David Damrosch tells.

In his response, Damrosch offers a rather rosy progress narrative about the field of comparative literature in the United States, where walls are coming down, borders are being crossed, language barriers are yielding to translation (or to global English), doors are being opened to immigrant and minority literatures, and scholars are becoming more worldly in their outlook. Damrosch, however, largely sidesteps the main points of my argument and their implications, instead changing the terms of debate in order to mount a pro homine defense of Franco Moretti’s ideas (and politics) in “Conjectures on World Literature” and offering an alternative history of American comparative literature making its way toward world literature. According to this view, the dramatic expansion of the ACLA over the past few decades is a story of the laissez-faire liberalization of comparative literature propelled in part by “growing interest in non-European literatures.” What sort of “interest” non-European literatures accrue is unclear, but the economic language is not incidental; the implicit measure of institutional progress appears to be mounting numbers (of scholars, of texts, etc.), popularization, and market success—just as the primary method of accounting for world literature in Damrosch’s model comes down to works that “gain on balance in translation.”Footnote ¹⁸

Damrosch’s description contrasts with what he calls my “rather stark outline of the state of the discipline today,” but it is also a far rosier picture than the one he himself offered in his ACLA presidential address in 2003. In “The Road of Excess: Comparative Literature at a Double Crossroads,” Damrosch worried that the geographical expansion underway at the American Comparative Literature Association was coming at “the cost of a dramatic foreshortening of the historical depth of our study.”Footnote ¹⁹ With recently reduced barriers, democratic expansion, and an “extended . . . literary map,” Damrosch observed, somewhere “between 80% and 90% of our conference papers have focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”Footnote ²⁰ The increased presentism of so much of the humanities today should concern us all, but one must also be mindful that a critique of presentism does not smuggle in another sort of inhospitality because so much of literary production by historically marginalized peoples (in the Western metropolitan centers as much as in those areas of the world that only exited formal European colonialism in the twentieth century) was written in the past two and a half centuries. In other words, a critique of presentism in an expanding comparative literature may, in fact, amount to a critique of geographical, cultural, or demographic expansion. Rather than consider how the current practices of comparison that I discuss may themselves be contributing to the contraction of the temporal scope of comparative literature even as they appear to enlarge its geography, however, in his response Damrosch positions me as only the latest illiberal gatekeeper seeking to maintain protectionist barriers against democratic forms of comparison. Further, Damrosch construes our divergent views on comparative literature today as a conflict between an old postcolonial perspective and a brave new world literature.

I detect a hint of dismissiveness in Damrosch’s repeated invocation of the term postcolonial and his assertion that I am outlining “a deep conflict between postcolonial and newer global perspectives.” Although I do describe myself in my author’s bio as teaching, among other things, “postcolonial literature,” I use the term only a handful of times in my essay and almost always as a temporal adjective marking the historical condition of coming after the colonial period. I am not disavowing postcolonial studies, although my training in ethnic and third world literatures was largely hostile to postcolonialism as Damrosch uses the term. In Damrosch’s response, postcolonial offers an easy pigeonhole to contain my critique, not only because it seems to apply to the literatures I mostly study but also because the label itself has been so persistently (and often wrongly and disingenuously) attacked over the past decade by partisans of the globalizing fields I discuss (in order to make room for their own globalization) that it now carries a taint of retrograde ethnonationalism and identitarianism. Turning my argument into a simple “postcolonial” complaint about the exclusion of some literatures and scholarly voices from comparative literature (which is not a point of my piece), Damrosch’s repetition of the term postcolonial seems to insist that I am simply prosecuting a petty and provincial academic turf battle. Indeed, that logic underpins a telling example that Damrosch offers about the fate of small European literatures today, specifically the “occlusion of Dutch literature,” which, he suggests, has been crowded out by the globalizing trends in literary studies. Attributing the observation to Theo D’haen but framing it in his own words, Damrosch asserts that today “far more attention is finally being given to non-hegemonic countries and populations, but now Dutch literature is ignored because the Netherlands isn’t located in the global south.”

In that unguarded moment, Damrosch ventriloquizes a kind of global south envy that, even as I find it both breathtaking and misguided, I am nevertheless glad to have it articulated so plainly. Indeed, having witnessed the late global expansion of the older, more conservative fields of literary studies that began in earnest in the early 2000s, I would argue that the globalizing mood was at least partially animated by just such a global south envy (or, in its more common institutional form, by a resentment of the emergence, dominance, and prestige of postcolonial studies). That is to say that world literature, global modernisms, and some of the other globalizing fields were reactions to, if not revenge for, the success of postcolonial studies, involving reversals of earlier orthodox judgments that rejected non-European literatures as derivative of or inferior to European literatures by now claiming that, for example, postcolonial literatures were always already modernist. A similar kind of postcolonial envy motivated Alan Hill’s expansion of the Heinemann catalogue and third world market in the 1960s, when he noted candidly that the empire “which the British soldiers and administrators had lost was being regained by British educators and publishers.”Footnote ²¹ With cooptative zeal, the empire strikes back when the empire writes back. If some form of global south envy has in fact propelled the globalization of other fields, then Ali Behdad’s insistence that the comparative method is compromised because it is the cause of (rather than the method for assessing) inequities between European and non-European literatures begins to seem even more commonsensical and astute.

Although the effects of a usually repressed global south envy seem very real, I find the idea itself as suspicious as that infamous form of psychosexual envy theorized by Freud at the turn of the last century, as misguided as rightwing attacks on affirmative action, and as misplaced as the resentments against immigrants from the global south currently being fanned in the United States and Europe (rather than more appropriately directing such feelings against the globalized systems of neoliberal exploitation that are making life in both the Middle East and the American Midwest difficult, if unequally so). In any case, Damrosch’s example (however true or false it may be) actually illustrates, rather than contests my point because the predominant way to give traditional literatures new life today is to compare them to historically marginalized literatures from elsewhere, preferably from an old colony, Dutch or otherwise. In too many cases, however, such comparisons simply turn the historically marginalized literature into a tool for the commendation of a (reformed) traditional field that now may claim the name of “global.”

At the end of his response, Damrosch faults me for not engaging Franco Moretti’s ideas, which, he says, might have made for a worthy article. Of course it would, but it also surely would have made for a strange presidential address to the ACLA and a tediously redundant discussion. Indeed, as the bibliographic paragraph that Damrosch compiles at the end of his response shows, debates about the merits of Moretti’s ideas abound, including in my own essay, “World Literature as Property,” which he indirectly references as one of the pieces in a special issue on world literature of the Cairo-based journal, Alif. In that essay, I offer an intellectual property critique of (the monopoly sector of) world literature and Moretti’s and Pascale Casanova’s “upcycling” of an old colonial comparative paradigm (one that both Diagne and Behdad discuss in their responses to my essay) that “divide[s] world literary space between those who bring newness into the world and those who recycle old ideas . . . between, that is, those who innovate and those who imitate.”Footnote ²² In any case, as I say clearly in “Locations of Comparison,” I chose to analyze Moretti’s argumentative method, rather than his “ideas” per se, precisely because they have been so well debated and are now so ubiquitous that I could presume a great majority of my audience would be familiar enough with his text to judge my own argument fully and fairly. For his part, Damrosch defends Moretti against what he labels my “wholesale dismissiveness” and failure to acknowledge that “Moretti’s study of morphology is political in intent”—as evidenced, Damrosch says, by the publication of his essays in New Left Review and his loyalty to an Italian Marxist identity. Likewise, Damrosch suggests I am remiss for not even mentioning Moretti’s important claim that “Forms are the abstract of social relationships; so formal analysis is in its own modest way an analysis of power” (cited in Damrosch). If I must be pointed about it, one way to restate an argument of my essay is that the form of Moretti’s analysis of power is itself a function of the very power he proposes to analyze.

My appeal to attend to the historical location and condition (the forum) of any set of comparisons and the comparative act is mounted through a critique of Moretti’s method. It is not a matter of simple disagreement over ideas or a conflict between postcolonial and other global or Marxist visions; rather, I am interested in the power relations that are themselves abstracted in the forms of contemporary comparative literature scholarship. If we accept Roberto Schwarz’s assertion, which Moretti cites in his text, that “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships,”Footnote ²³ as I do, then it is not only literary forms that can tell us something about the power dynamics of social relations. Forms (and forums) of scholarship are themselves abstracts of specific social relationships, and therefore are also susceptible to morphological (and other) analysis that can help to disclose the unequal and uneven power relations among scholars in world literary-critical space. In retrospect, perhaps the point was made too subtly in my address when I gave examples of how Moretti uses Emmanuel Obiechina and Abiola Irele as “informants rather than theorists,” and I turn back on him his own political conclusion that his method of distant reading shows how “symbolic power varies from place to place”Footnote ²⁴ —meaning, for Moretti, that literary authors at the “periphery” wield less symbolic power than those at the center. Part of my point was that Moretti’s method of distant reading other peoples’ comparative literature scholarship also ultimately reveals the symbolic power variances between those holding the fort of comparative literature or the empire of world literature and those knocking for entry—or, perhaps more importantly, those wanting to skirt the occupied territories and to ignore the dominant forms of the fields of comparative and world literature entirely.

Ultimately, Damrosch tells a familiar story about the discipline of comparative literature, a progress narrative that starts along the river Rhine (with Madame de Staël in this case) and moves outward to cover the rest of the world. Such a view follows the traditional logic of Westphalian internationalism that made Europe the central subject of history, law, and literature while pushing imperialism and its role in the making of Europe and comparative literature to the margins. From that perspective, one could only conclude that comparative literature has become more permissive and more hospitable to non-European literatures and scholars—and that the location of comparison matters very little. If, however, one shifts focus and forums and begins somewhere else, or with someone such as Abbé Grégoire, as Souleymane Bachir Diagne does, then other histories of comparative literature come into view—counterhegemonic histories that neither pretend to exhaust the range and diversity of comparative literature practices and purposes nor forget the multiple roles that colonialism, slavery, capitalist globalization, and other powerful forces have played in the expansion of comparative literature, its methods and intentions. Indeed, other locations of comparison have a lot to teach us, not least about the historical contingencies and complicities of our own locations of comparison.