Afterword—Comparison Zones

Abstract

The effort to decolonize comparative methods presupposes the colonization and colonial orientation of comparativism or an ersatz cosmopolitanism derived from geo-cultural assumptions about peoples, places and their knowledges. Here, comparison is presented as something taking place within a “comparison zone”—a space akin to Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zone”—where “peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, racial inequality, and intractable conflict” (Pratt 1992, 6). Within this zone, comparison and translation become scenes of struggle over representation, recognition, and the modalities of encounter and dialogue. This being the case, the comparison of cultures becomes equally concerned with the invention and transformation of cultures, peoples, and knowledges, as well as the interrogation of the category of culture itself or the categories that a given culture privileges or those who are privileged in the study of certain cultures. By interrogating the empire of comparison derived from a particular geo-cultural and geo-philosophical orientation, the articles in this special issue point to the possibilities of staging an encounter between thinkers and cultures in a manner that enables “us” to compare, think and live otherwise. For instance, the essays focus on comparative philosophy and raise questions about how “philosophy has been willed” and the implications for the categories and referents that we use to think about, compare, translate, or inhabit the world. Rather than limit themselves to the question of what is it that we compare when we do comparative philosophy, comparative literature, or comparative politics, the authors raise a different set of questions: Who are we and how do we compare? What is at stake when we compare? How have our modes and models of comparison been colonized and how can we compare otherwise? In their different ways, the authors engage key themes and problematics in postcolonial and decolonial studies, as well as those of comparative or cross-cultural philosophy, in order to point to ways that each of these fields can learn from the other and become more innovative, ethically inflected, and with political methods that can arise from new relations and re-orientations. Based on, but not restricted to the insights derived from the papers collected in this special issue, the following afterword reflections are aimed at raising an additional set of questions that highlight the entanglements, traps, and pitfalls of these attempts to decolonize comparative methods. Given that both how and what we compare today still bears the signs and vestiges of a colonial past, this afterword calls for a deeper reflection on the