In the introduction to his Orientalism (1978), Edward Said claims that, “the general liberal consensus that ‘true’ knowledge is fundamentally non-political (and conversely, that overtly political knowledge is not ‘true’ knowledge) obscures the highly …political circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced” (10). In its last pages, he concludes, “interesting work is most likely to be produced by scholars whose allegiance is to a discipline defined intellectually and not to a ‘field’ like Orientalism defined either canonically, imperially, or geographically” (326). While the first claim, which challenges the classical liberal distinction between “pure” and “political knowledge, has changed over the decades from more controversial to widely accepted, the second claim that producing knowledge through commitment to method points to the unfinished business of disciplinary practice in the shadow of a politicized humanities.

              Where Said’s late 20th century discussion of the political nature of knowledge production carefully delineates the qualifications and pitfalls that travel with thinking of humanities scholarship as a political enterprise, we live in a 21st century where writers outside the university represent humanities scholarship as purely political, and they do so often crudely and cynically. In the face of these exigencies, how do scholars of literary studies currently understand their “allegiance to a discipline defined intellectually”?

              Scholars of comparative literature working in multiple subdisciplines will offer their own case studies of how the politicization of the humanities has interfaced with their own disciplinary practice, through their engagements with poetics, translation, literary theory, cultural studies et al. In the course of these presentations, we investigate in a particular way, the current “state of the discipline” through key examples of scholarly practice in the face of a general atmosphere of political repression and degradation of the study of literature.