Afterlife of a Discipline

Abstract

As many have noted, the title of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's book Death of a operates as a provocation, for it contains a key omission-which discipline?-that requires the reader uncertainly to provide the answer: Literature? Having supplied such an answer, the reader is then invited to draw the inference that Comparative Literature, as a viable branch of the humanities, is dead and done for-brought down by the economics of academic book marketing, technological literacy, or the irrelevance of traditional literary culture to the greater sum of world cultures. But we should not be beguiled by this first pass through a title. As a text, Death of a attends to how a particular discipline-understood to be Comparative Literature but not necessarily so named -has remained as relevant as ever to rethinking the humanities. This is a book about how to make literary criticism and theory resilient during tough economic and intellectual times. Its ostensible pessimism is belied by Spivak's manifest commitment to new trajectories within literary studies. Death of a sets out a program for how to define Comparative Literature in response to successive Reports on the State of the Discipline put out by the American Comparative Literature Association in 1965, 1975, and, most notably, 1995, the year in which the Bernheimer Report was published along with an array of responses as Comparative Literature in the Age ofMulticulturalism. In assessing the fallout of the Bernheimer Report some ten years hence, Death of a assigns renewed importance to the potential contribution of Area Studies to reconfigurations of the humanities and argues in favor of a discipline flexible enough to respond to shifting demographic realities-what she calls emergent multicultural empires or para-state collectivities (15). Though the Bernheimer report recognized the relevance to Comparative Literature of cultural and ethnic studies (as well as popular culture or forms of cultural production that are not necessarily literary-epitaphs in cemeteries, for example), Spivak sees the attempt to incorporate cultural studies as productive of new kinds of problems. Cultural studies frequently reproduces stereotypes of identity and ethnicity; as a result, the literary specificity of indigenous cultures gets lost. Area Studies fares a bit better (despite its imbrication in Cold War politics), for Comparative Literature and Area Studies