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.