Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses Edited by Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman (review)

Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses is a collection of essays that expands on a special issue of New Literary History (2009) by adding six new essays to the ten that previously appeared in the journal. Comparison comprises three parts, each of which explores a different aspect of comparative thinking. Part I questions political, ethical, and epistemological aspects of comparison; part II explains diverse methods of comparison and the practical problems underlying it; and part III discusses comparison across disciplines such as literature, anthropology, and history. In Comparison, editors Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman present a comprehensive discussion on the theory, practice, and modalities of comparison.

Part I, “The Stakes of Comparison,” opens with R. Radhakrishnan’s essay “Why Compare?” that questions the existential concerns of comparison. The set of questions posed by Radhakrishnan emphasizes power relations that inherently rule the nature of comparison and inevitably base comparison on uneven relations. Radhakrishnan especially criticizes the comparison of literature from distinctly separate contexts. This kind of comparison, he argues, can reduce the differences between literary works from distinct contexts to “mere hinterlands” (19). This claim stimulates a productive discussion among the writers of essays in part I of Comparison. Friedman responds to Radhakrishnan’s claim by classifying such comparison of literature from distinct contexts as a “collage” or a subcategory of “juxtapositional mode of comparison” (40–42). Zhang Longxi adds that the comparison of radically different literary works poses an “exciting and promising prospect for comparative literature” (59). Haun Saussy reflects on the concerns of violence and unevenness emphasized by Radhakrishnan. Saussy, thus, ends part I with a retrospective on the primary political and ethical questions underlying comparison. Each essay in part I not only discusses the problems and drawbacks of comparison, but also proposes solutions to improve comparative methods for a more equal, inclusive, and less violent comparison.

The most comprehensive section of the book, part II, “Comparison in the World: Uses and Abuses,” concentrates on the practical aspects of comparison. The essays in part II offer new methods of comparison along the lines of theories on transnationality, cosmopolitanism, and center–periphery relations. Shu-mei Shih criticizes the tendency of the comparative method to accept centralized literatures as the standard against which other literatures are assessed. Shih’s proposed method of comparison, the “relational method” (80), reads literary works “as participating in a network” (84) on a relational axis on a global scale. In this method, there is no center–periphery, juxtaposition, or standardization of one party of comparison. Walter D. Mignolo continues along the lines of Shih in questioning the western European imperial roots of the comparative method (103); he argues that in order to understand comparison outside the boundaries of Hegelian and Kantian imperial roots, we need to “decolonize knowledge.” The decolonization of knowledge, he suggests, is possible through the “unveiling of the imperial connotations of key concepts” such as literature, comparison, and aesthetics (109). Robert Stam and Ella Shohat continue Mignolo’s discussion on the impact of imperialism on comparison and offer the use of “transnational comparison” to understand the “asymmetries of power” in the colonial context and to explore the “interrelations and linked analogies within a global system of power” (142). Ania Loomba suggests yet another approach to comparison: “comparison across temporal and spatial boundaries” to connect seemingly disparate contexts (147). Loomba’s proposed modality of comparison aims to destabilize the emphasis on the exceptionality of European modernism.

Essays by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins in part II complement each other by offering a critique of comparison on two distinct scales: on a social and an individual scale, respectively. Cheah defines comparison as a “material infrastructure” (168) that “directly impacts the population rather than individual consciousness” (181). This infrastructural comparison, according to Cheah, is nationally and transnationally concerned with productivity. Robbins demonstrates the inevitable impact of national affiliations on an individual’s putative cosmopolitan outlook of the world in the example of Noam...