The seminar proposes to re-conceptualize methods by placing decolonial approaches, non-canonical imaginaries and alternative epistemologies at the center of comparative analysis. It takes up three key ideas of contemporary thinkers — including Édouard Glissant, Gloria Anzaldúa, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall and Walter Mignolo — as tools for comparing literatures, namely transnational, Indigenous, and archipelagic works. These ideas include: (a) the irrecoverability of origins, particularly in relation to colonialism, slavery, diaspora and identity formation; (b) the tendency to validate living archives — collective memory, mythic and non-rational forms of knowledge — against Western modernity’s privileging of reason, empirical origins and linear history; (c) the idea of archipelagic plurality vs. continental totality — openness to others in the Diverse introduced by Glissant’s concept of “relation" (Philosophie de la relation, 2009, p. 45); Anzaldúa’s “mestiza consciousness” (Borderlands/La Frontera, 1987); Gilroy’s diasporic ethics of conviviality (The Black Atlantic, 1993), Hall’s concept of identities as “in process” (Cultural Identity and Diaspora, 1990, p. 225), and Mignolo’s idea pluriversalisalism (The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 2011, p. 32). 

The seminar will comprise up to twelve 20-minute papers over three sessions, exploring how these theories can inform the comparative analysis of literatures in order to enable comparisons beyond the institutional divisions of literatures, languages and knowledge systems. It also asks: To what extent can these approaches be used to compare and capture the distinctiveness of contemporary non-canonical literatures—those that are historically subordinated within mainstream political and literary systems and represent marginalized, underrepresented cultures, voices and perspectives? How can these approaches diversify the postcolonial paradigm in comparative analysis? Which literary metaphors fit these theories? The seminar welcomes abstracts that engage with a variety of cultural and literary forms — novels, essays, oral works, historical texts, plays, paintings, digital media — outside the canonical European and North American contexts, while exploring how these theories are put into practice and allow transcultural, transregional comparisons and relations.  

Possible paper topics include but are not limited to: 

• Decolonizing Comparative Methodologies
• Non-canonical Imaginaries and Epistemologies
• Literary metaphors of archipelagic plurality
• Transnational and Indigenous literature
• Pluriversalism and Decolonial Thought
• Diasporic Ethics and Conviviality
• Challenges to Institutional Divisions
• Identity as Process