Flesh and Fish Blood: Postcolonialism, Translation, and the Vernacular

Conclusion: Postcolonialism and Comparatism

143 Conclusion Postcolonialism and Comparatism In pursuit of the vernacular, I have been led to two ancillary concerns— translation and comparatism. These two topics have found iteration in my argument in multiple ways. Noting how the vernacular directed attention to the question of translation, I took up that topic in the previous chapter. I conclude by turning to comparatism and comparison, a term clearly summoned forth by the notion of comparatism. Though my focus on comparatism is narrower in scope, there are resonances between my argument about translation and my observations on comparatism and comparison in this chapter. I partly rely on these resonances to develop my remarks about comparatism and comparison. Comparison is a commonsensical, everyday word. In contrast, the infelicitous-sounding comparatism is unlikely to find much purchase outside the university. Where the former is free of the taint of jargon, the latter denotes a deliberate approach to academic study. What kind of approach? And with what consequences for postcolonial studies? What kinds of intervention into postcolonial studies as an academic field does comparatism enable? What are the challenges it poses to postcolonial studies? And what challenges to comparatism does the field of postcolonial studies pose? Such are the questions I take up in this conclusion. Given the nature of the material I have explored, my reference to comparatism might be said to invoke immediately comparative literary and cultural studies. Recently, a variety of works have taken up 144 | Conclusion the task of reassessing this field of academic study. Fittingly enough, the most widely discussed are probably the two reports on the field commissioned by the American Comparative Literature Association in 1993 and 2005, presented along with responses in volumes edited by Charles Bernheimer (1995a) and Haun Saussy (2006a) respectively. Other works include those by Gayatri Spivak, Susan Bassnet, and Emily Apter. Of these, Spivak’s and Bassnet’s are written out of an extreme sense of crisis within comparative literature as a field of study, though both suggest possibilities for renewal. Spivak’s book is entitled Death of a Discipline (2003), while Bassnet ends her book by noting, “Comparative literature as a discipline has had its day. Cross-cultural work in women’s studies, in post-colonial theory, in cultural studies has changed the face of literary studies generally. We should look upon translation studies as the principal discipline from now on, with comparative literature as a valued but subsidiary subject area” (1993, 161). Apter, though less emphatic in her sense of crisis, too recognizes the need for a reinvention of the field as “a new comparative literature” using translation as a “fulcrum” (2006, 243). Taken together, these and other recent reflections suggest the churning within comparative literary and cultural studies; of course, it is also true that disciplinary anxiety has always seemed constitutive of the field. As Bernheimer notes in his introduction, entitled “The Anxieties of Comparison,” “Comparative literature is anxiogenic” (1995b, 1).1 What I want to do here is not offer yet another argument about the field of comparative literary and cultural studies, or issue another call for renewal, but rather make a few observations about comparatism— a methodology of academic study that is at the heart of a variety of fields in addition to comparative literary and cultural studies: comparative sociology, comparative politics, and comparative philosophy, to name only three. Rather than entering into a discussion of the need for or problems with the field of comparative literary and cultural studies, I want to maintain my focus on postcolonialism and to reflect on the viability as well as the difficulty of comparatist critical approaches in relation to postcolonial studies. I want to assess how comparatism can intercede within postcolonial studies. It is to the credit of Postcolonialisms : An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism, a fine recent reader on postcolonial theory edited by Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair, that the comparative aspect of postcolonialism is sufficiently acknowledged. In their introduction, Desai and Nair write, “The large conceptual grasp of the field of postcolonial studies has meant that even Conclusion | 145 scholars who define themselves as specialists in a region—say, Anglophone West Africa—have nevertheless often thought of their projects in comparative terms” (2005, 1). Desai and Nair do not note, however, that scholars in the field have not generally shown an inclination to systematically account for the place of comparison and comparatism within postcolonial studies. Instead, the predilection, as I...