Nonrelation, Comparison, and Dissensus
Description
This seminar proposes a fundamental shift in how we conceptualize the work of comparison. Rather than privileging dialogue, bridging, or civilizational affinity as ideal ends of comparison, it centers nonrelation, rupture, refusal, and aesthetic disalignment as vital and often overlooked conditions of literary relation. Drawing on Adhira Mangalagiri’s States of Disconnect and Jacques Rancière’s theory of dissensus, the seminar proposes to work with the concept of nonrelation not as a failure to connect, but rather as a critical mode of literary and political engagement. It views nonrelation as a condition in which tension, silence, and refusal become creative forces.
Focusing on Palestine, we begin from the premise that frameworks of “dialogue” and “coexistence” in the context of Israel/Palestine have often served as the soft power armatures of state violence, masking apartheid, genocide and occupation under the liberal-humanist language of mutual understanding and missed opportunities for reconciliation. This seminar challenges those assumptions and emphasizes how the “relational” in Palestine has been undergirded by erasure, false equivalences, and constraints when it comes to Palestinians’ “permission to narrate.” We propose that nonrelation in the form of deliberate missed encounters, strategic refusals, institutional silences, and asymmetrical reading practices is the defining grammar of Palestinian literary relationality.
One of the ways this seminar approaches refusal is by examining its many expressions across a spectrum, from absolute rejection to strategic conditionality. Refusal is not a fixed or moralizing position but a processual and relational act. We are interested in how refusal emerges as both tactic and ethic: for example, some Palestinian writers reject translation into Hebrew, while others permit translation only under specific conditions, such as when the translator is another Palestinian. The widow of Abdelrahman Munif refused Hebrew translations of his work, as did the widow of Ghassan Kanafani, despite several of Kanafani’s texts circulating in Hebrew today. Ibtisam Azem is another figure whose refusal underscores this dynamic. Rather than reading these refusals as final gestures of withdrawal, the seminar takes them seriously as critical interventions and acts that challenge the normative assumptions of what translation is supposed to do, especially in a settler-colonial context.
While Palestine remains the central site of inquiry, we also welcome contributions that use the paradigmatic tensions outlined above to reflect more broadly on comparison, dissensus, and nonrelation across languages/geographies. We are particularly interested in work that mobilizes new theoretical and methodological approaches (for example digital humanities) to move the field of Comparative Literature beyond ideas of encounter and dialogue.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Dima Ayoub is Associate Professor and Chair of Arabic at Middlebury College
Speaker Bio
Johanna Sellman is Associate Professor in the department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. A scholar of Arabic and Comparative Literature, her research interests include modern Arabic, francophone, and Scandinavian literatures, migration and postmigration studies, translation, gender and sexuality, and ecocriticism.
Speaker Bio
Hamad Ben Eassa is a graduate student in English at Yale University. His research sits at the intersection of postcolonial studies and poetics, focusing on 20th and 21st-century Arabic literature. His project investigates the literatures of statelessness, examining how Palestinian and Kuwaiti writers generate a unique poetic language that challenges Western theories of the novel and the lyric. His work explores concepts of collective voice, opacity, and refusal as forms of political engagement.
Speaker Bio
Her research focuses on modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. She edited David Vogel's lost novel Wienner Romanze (Aufbau Verlag, 2013). Her study on Zalman Shneour was published in 2019 (Mosad Bialik Press). Bound to Disappear: The Hebrew-European Writing Culture During the Early 20th Century appeared in The Simon-Dubnow Institute, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021. The Last Hebrew-European Writer: David Frishman and the Modern Hebrew-European Literature will be published in De Gruyter Brill.
Papers
Speaker Bio
David Markus is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program at NYU. His work appears in publications such as Afterimage, Parapraxis, Art Journal, Art in America, Frieze, BOMB, Hyperallergic, and the Brooklyn Rail. He is the author of Notes on Trumpspace: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Fantasy of Home. Markus was a 2024-2025 Center for New Jewish Culture Fellow. He proudly serves on the organizing committee of NYU Contract Faculty United, which achieved recognition in 2024.
Speaker Bio
Amal Eqeiq is an Associate Professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College. She is the author of Indigenous Affinities: Toward Solidarity Across the Global South (Fordham University Press, forthcoming in December 2025).
Speaker Bio
Dr. Daniel Behar is a tenure-track lecturer of modern Arabic literature at the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research articles focus on Syrian literature, movements in Arabic modernism in relation to world poetry, poetry translations and theories of translation. His book Syrian Poets and Vernacular Modernity was published June 2025 with Edinburgh University Press.
Speaker Bio
Na'ama Rokem is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Her book, Zionism in Translation: Encounters in the German Hebrew Archive, is forthcoming with University of Chicago Press in Autumn 2026.