While Indigenous literary studies has grown substantially over the past several decades, comparative approaches that place Indigenous texts, traditions, and intellectual frameworks in conversation with one another remain relatively rare. Too often, Indigenous texts are incorporated into comparative, world, or global literary frameworks without meaningful engagement with Indigenous studies scholarship, or are read primarily through the organizing categories of nation, region, empire, or postcoloniality. This seminar seeks to create a space for comparative Indigenous literary inquiry that centers Indigenous texts, epistemologies, and methods on their own terms.

Drawing on Chickasaw scholar Chadwick Allen's call for a trans-Indigenous literary studies (2014), we are interested in comparative approaches that move across tribal, national, and regional contexts while remaining accountable to the particular histories and epistemologies from which they emerge. How might comparative literary study illuminate connections among Indigenous worlds without flattening difference? How might Indigenous texts help us think beyond the nation-state while addressing ongoing struggles for sovereignty and self-determination?

At the same time, the seminar seeks to engage critically with the possibilities and limitations of comparative frameworks themselves. What forms of comparison become possible when Indigenous texts are placed in conversation with one another rather than primarily with metropolitan, colonial, or national literatures? How might Indigenous literary studies reshape the assumptions of comparative literature as a discipline? What methods are required for approaching texts situated within distinct cultural traditions, languages, oral narrative systems, and colonial histories? How can scholars engage in comparative work while remaining accountable to the specificity of local contexts and Indigenous intellectual traditions?

Over the course of conference, the seminar hopes to foster a conversation around the possibilities and challenges of comparative Indigenous literary study itself.

We welcome papers that explore connections, resonances, tensions, and encounters among Indigenous texts, oral traditions, and cultural practices across different regions and colonial contexts.