This panel explores the possibility of recognizing the practice of comparative literature as a rehearsal of entanglements with the nonhuman world. While predominant understanding of comparison often locates its unfolding in the human mind, with the nonhuman deemed as its mere object, the present planetary condition has made it apparent that the latter is not simply inert matter, but instead active agent that partake and even co-constitute what might initially appear as an exclusively human phenomenon. Indeed, as Ursula K. Heise asserts in the 2017 ACLA State of the Discipline Report, there currently looms “the challenge of the nonhuman,” which “invit[es] us to reconsider human existence, intentionality, and agency as only part of networks that also include other modes of being and agency.”

How can comparative literature then be reimagined as a practice of being and becoming with nonhumans? What would it entail the practice if in lieu of human languages, cultures, nations, geographies, and histories, among others, nonhumans—such as birds in migration, a monsoon trough, species of a tropical plant, nonrenewable wastes, extracted minerals, etc.—become the units of comparison? In other words, what would a planetary comparative literature look like, if the planet is now recognized to be not only a “species of alterity,” as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak once described it, but also an agentic matter capable, too, of comparing, allowing new permutations of juxtapositions to emerge? 

This panel invites contributions that attempt to consider these questions, by way of theoretical reflections, comparative demonstrations, and other forms of critical and creative engagements. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Nonhumans and/as literature/transmedia
• Climate/weather/biome as grounds of comparison
• Comparativity in/of disasters and environmental crises
• Technologies and things in/as circulation
• Reconfigurations of comparative categories via nonhumans