Introduction: Comparative Studies in a Precarious Present

Abstract

Introduction:Comparative Studies in a Precarious Present Joshua Synenko This special issue of Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée (CRCL/RCLC) bears the pain and scars of COVID-19, having been repeatedly postponed during the first and second waves of the pandemic. During this time, many others had initiated efforts to turn the pandemic into an object of research in the humanities, with prominent journals devoting their own special issues to aspects of the crisis (Erni and Striphas; Ironstone and Bird; Nunes and Ozog). The articles in Comparatism Now! were also edited and revised at the height of the lockdowns, and while all but one makes an explicit reference to it (Lourdes Arciniega's "Archiving the Future"), the immediate pressures of the time, on both scholarly research and teaching, became a significant factor in completing this project. Having said that, despite the constraints of publishing in unique circumstances, it may be important to acknowledge that many of these pressures are hardly new. The pandemic has built on existing convulsive changes that were identified even decades prior, for example, as Bill Readings wrote in his groundbreaking work The University in Ruins in 1997. The true impact of COVID-19 is still unknown to us as the crisis continues in different forms. Yet the specific "pivoting" that it has required of academic labourers coincides with a much more deliberate destabilization -and technological acceleration -that is currently at play in all university disciplines. This larger and much older pattern of change hasn't proven to be an existential risk to fields in the humanities, as many have warned in the past. But it does affect the specific [End Page 153] production of knowledge that we as humanities scholars can lay claim to. In fact, this concern was part of the initial motivation for assembling this special issue. In 2019, the Association Canadienne de Littérature Comparée/Canadian Comparative Literature Association (ACLC/CCLA) gathered at the University of British Columbia to determine how comparative literary scholars have been forced to "pivot" amid the overlapping circles of knowledge that have emerged in recent years. These include the epochal changes in encyclopedic knowledge transfer that have now, almost definitively, pushed aside the study of literature from the central role it once occupied (Rajan). Before and beyond the pandemic, conditions inside the university have inspired many successful and unsuccessful attempts at totalization, rationality, governmentality, and systems logic. Where, then, does literary study fit in these current formations? Consistent with the annual theme of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences/Fédération des Sciences Humaines in 2019, "Circles of Conversation," we explored the circle as an important metaphor of power as demonstrated by the existence of academic boundaries, centres and peripheries, exclusions, and forms of inequality. While acknowledging Tilottama Rajan's forewarning about the onset of the coming hegemony of academic "culturalism," we recognize something in literary study that remains critically attuned to these changes, a kind of listening ear on the present that may indeed signal the potential for a critique of those hegemonies. Some may even argue that literary study is urgently needed in times of destabilization, such as the one we are experiencing now. Comparative Literature, then, which is part of literary study, belongs to a collective effort of responding to the larger crisis by navigating its own internal crisis; and, as an inevitable result of this process, of staking a claim for its continued existence. The demand of Comparatism Now! aligns with Susan Ingram and Irene Sywenky's 2019 edited collection Comparative Literature in Canada: Contemporary Scholarship, Pedagogy, and Publishing in Review, which speaks to the urgent need for reappraising the discipline with a focus on the Canadian context. We also align with David Palumbo-Liu in "Ethics Before Comparison," his keynote address at the fiftieth-anniversary meeting of the ACLC/CCLA at UBC in 2019. In his presentation, Palumbo-Liu urged Canadian comparatists to remember that while our scholarship is founded upon critical evaluation and judgement, an important part of this effort is paying respect to the material challenges involved in "ethical reckoning," which, as he says, often takes "the shape of a...