Introduction

On August 30 and 31, 2018, a conference on comparative cultural studies was held at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. The journal Comparative Literature Studies (CLS) joined forces with the Hungarian comparative literature journal Neohelicon and with the journal Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art (TSLA) headquartered at East China Normal University in Shanghai to cosponsor the conference. Scholars traveling from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America presented articles on a wide variety of topics under the general conference theme.

The keynote address for the conference, outlining the connections between memory studies and literary studies, was delivered by Astrid Erll, Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main. Erll has worked on memories of the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, British colonialism in India, and the Vietnam War. Plenary talks were given by Sabina Doran, Associate Professor of German and Visual Studies at Penn State University, author of The Culture of Yellow (2013), and Yehong Zhang, Professor at Tsinghua University who has coedited with Gerd Lauer, Professor and Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Basel a special issue (54.4, 2017) of CLS on Cross-Cultural Reading. The three journals solicited expanded versions of the various conference talks, each journal requesting the articles that were most in line with its respective mission statement: Neohelicon specializes in comparative literary studies; TSLA in theory. As editor of CLS, I tried to reserve for that journal the articles that I felt had the most to say about cultural studies.

The Roman numeral “II” in the title of this issue alludes to an earlier (2005) special issue guest-edited by Michael Bérubé, under the title: Comparative Cultural Studies. In each case it was myself who suggested the topic, because I have always been curious as to whether such an undertaking as comparative cultural studies is in fact realizable. Or perhaps more precisely, I have been haunted by the controversy surrounding the 1993 decennial report of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), also known as “The Bernheimer Report.” There, after reciting a decalogue of comparative approaches, Charles Bernheimer controversially concluded: “These ways of contextualizing literature in the expanded fields of discourse, culture, ideology, race, and gender are so different from the old models of literary study according to authors, nations, periods, and genres that the term ‘literature’ may no longer adequately describe our object of study.”¹ The author of the report then goes on to lament the disconnect between scholars who pursue these approaches and the institutions of comparative literature. He notes the discussion on some campuses about the possibility (or necessity) of adding a phrase “ . . . and Cultural Studies,” or “ . . . and Cultural Critique” to the name of the local department of comparative literature. To my knowledge, this renaming has not been a widespread phenomenon.

In that 2005 special issue of CLS (42.2), devoted to the topic of comparative cultural studies, Bérubé mused that “there does not seem to be any reason why cultural studies and comparative literature have had so little to do with one another.”² And yet, such was the case, and in stark contrast to postcolonial studies whose leading figures often were comparatists. A case of limited attention space? Bérubé’s hypothesis was that each field tended to rest largely within its foundational impulses: comparative literature came to the United States from Europe along with theoretical approaches such as semiotics, structuralism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction. Cultural studies originated in Britain on the basis of sociological cum Marxist approaches to literature developed by Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, and above all, Michel Foucault. As a result, comparative literature remained largely within the modality of close reading and the valorization of texts as aesthetic objects, while cultural studies sought to elevate a variety of cultural practices to the level of textuality, and to understand texts as cultural products and objects of consumption. In those cases where cultural studies work deals primarily with texts, its task is to analyze them as embodying the “social life of subjective forms,” to use Richard Johnson’s language, at a particular moment of their circulation. Just...