This seminar engages in comparative analysis of literary and cultural productions that connect Asia to the Middle East and to the Caribbean. Through Arab-Asian comparisons, and projects bringing together Middle Eastern and East Asian Studies and South Asian Studies, we will address questions related to disciplinarily marginal approaches to comparative literature and comparison of literature from the global margins. How should we read the differences between direct and indirect (mediated, for instance, by translation) exchanges? What analytic approaches are necessary to unpack the complex power dynamics at play in such exchanges, or between scholars and archives in the Global South? What are the challenges, both theoretical and logistic, that accompany comparative projects in this geographic frame? What conversations between disciplinary tools are necessary to further comparative literature’s move away from Eurocentrism; what approaches can be revitalized, and which need to be left behind? What roles do translation and multilingualism play, both in this archive and in its analysis?Turning to the Caribbean, We will analyze how Asian-Caribbean relationalities have impacted both the Caribbean’s nation-building processes and the formation of diasporic Asian identities. How might Asian experiences—from the period of indenture to the present, and shaped by intersecting social positions such as race, gender, sexuality, religion, and class—refashion our understanding of Caribbean nationalism and diaspora? At the same time, how might Caribbean realities—in which racial and cultural mixing is common but colonial legacies, linguistic practices, sociopolitical climates, and power dynamics vary across the islands—offer another (trans)national site for studying Asian migrations and diasporas?