“The Negro is comparison,” writes Frantz Fanon in his searing psychopolitical excavation of blackness, whiteness, and the human in Black Skin, White Masks. Taking comparison further in The Wretched of the Earth, he asserts that the native intellectual battles “on the field of the whole continent.” Fanon’s theories of comparison—through the vexed formation of the subject and of revolutionary consciousness—mount a set of problems for the interstices of Black studies and comparative literature. Pushing against linguistic, national, disciplinary, temporal, and diasporic divides, this seminar invites participants to chart directions of study and struggle for, against, and around comparison in Black studies.

Comparative practices of intertextuality, reference, allusion, and internationalism have animated generations of critics and activists alike, across aesthetic, political, historical, and psychic terrains of Black struggle. Simultaneously, following Fanon and others, Black studies has challenged the overdetermined seductions of comparativity, through décalage (Brent Hayes Edwards), monstrous intimacies (Christina Sharpe), strange affinities (Roderick Ferguson and Grace Kyungwon Hong), difficult diasporas (Samantha Pinto), ruses of analogy (Frank Wilderson), metonymic color politics (Anne Garland Mahler), and insurgent and imperial grammars of Black feminism (Erica Edwards). In the textures of the everyday, feminist cultural workers have forged the craft of comparison across difference and scale, what Toni Cade Bambara locates as multiracial sisterhood “in snatched time moments in hallways and conference corridors, caucusing between sets.” 

This seminar welcomes proposals that put pressure on comparison and the comparative in Black studies. Possible questions to consider: What does comparison foreclose and foment, figure and disfigure in Black aesthetics and politics? How have social movements practiced and envisioned comparison from below as a method, strategy, tactic, and/or weapon? How have translation, adaption, reception, and circulation informed Black studies, now and then? How might we apprehend comparisons to blackness as the grounds for human rights, minoritarian politics, gender and sexual formation, and fields of study? What are the current institutions, reading protocols, structures, and conditions that make comparison im/possible? What are the poetic and political stakes of Black critical theory’s challenges to analogy, intimacy, metaphor, reference, and/or solidarity? 

From, across, and toward a range of disciplines, objects, orientations, and itineraries, this panel is very open to eccentric comparisons, unconventional contributions, and strange encounters in Black studies. Send questions or inquiries to [email protected].