Since the 1993 Bernheimer report, Comparative Literature as a field has officially taken a stance against its historic Eurocentrism. Likewise in 1993, María Rosa Menocal questioned the foundations of Romance philology by reaching before 1492 to a medieval Mediterranean mix of Spanish, Arabic, and Hebrew poetics. Today, scholars of the global south regularly appeal to the journal Lotus and its multi-lingual publication in Arabic, French, and English while based out of Cairo as a model of literary circulation beyond the dominant logics of colonial mediation (Hala Halim, 2012 and Anne Garland Mahler, 2018). What is the unique role of Arabic in Comparative Literature as it is practiced as a field in North America, a field that still feels the drag of its Eurocentric base? Given its historic and colonial proximity to Europe, how does Arabic function in our teaching and research within Comparative literature today, now that three decades have passed since the critique of Eurocentrism became mainstream? 

This seminar invites participants who aim to think collectively about the specific interventions Arabists can make in the field today given Arabic’s unique positionality, and how these interventions are similar and distinct across time periods. Other questions participants might consider include: 

• How can Arabic philology and literary theory challenge Eurocentric conceptual knowledge, past and present?
• How is the study of Arabic hindered by current geopolitics and budgetary cuts to language study?
• What does it mean to theorize with Arabic while in the global north and amidst ongoing wars in the Middle East?
• How does Arabic uniquely find its way into Comparative Literature as a language situated on the borders of Europe? 

This seminar welcomes contributions that range from conceptual retrieval from classical Arabic poetics; Arabic in comparative pre-modern contexts with Spanish, Hebrew, Persian, Chinese, amongst others; Francophone and Arabophone contrapuntal comparisons; Anglo-Arab literature; modern Middle Eastern literary comparativism (with Hebrew, Turkish, Persian, etc.); Arabic and Afro-Asian conceptions of world literature; and beyond.