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What Can American Studiesand Comparative LiteratureLearn from Each OtherAli Behdad*

The fields of comparative literature and American studies

long have had a fraught relationship. Although both fields emerged

almost contemporaneously in the American academy, flourished

during the Cold War era with the support of the National Defense

Education Act of 1958, and engaged in a reflexive approach to lit-

erary studies that addressed diverse topics from an interdisciplinary

perspective, the relationship between these two fields, both peda-

gogically and intellectually, has been rife with anxiety about pro-

fessional status and a conspicuous lack of interest in each others

disciplinary approaches. This disciplinary tension is evident, for

example, in the 1975 Greene Report on Professional Standards to

the American Comparative Literature Association, in which the

authors of the report drew attention, with evident concern, to the

growth of interdisciplinary programs such as American studies

(30), considering them a factor in the dangerous trend in the

academy where, according to the authors, [i]n at least some col-

leges and universities[,] Comparative Literature seems to be pur-

veyed in the style of a smorgasbord at bargain rates (31).

Although both fields have undergone major transformations since

the mid-1970s, most importantly the rise of high theory and the

growing interest in non-European literary traditions in comparative

literature and the integration of ethnic literatures and the emergence

of an anti-exceptionalist critical attitude in American studies,

*Ali Behdad is John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature, Professor of English

and Comparative Literature, and Chair of the English Department at UCLA. He is

the author of Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution

(1994) and A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the

United States (2005). He is the co-editor (with Dominic Thomas) of A

Companion to Comparative Literature (2011). He is currently completing a

manuscript on Orientalist photography.

American Literary History, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 608617doi:10.1093/alh/ajs033Advance Access publication June 28, 2012# The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

comparative literature and American studies continue to maintain

strict disciplinary boundaries as demonstrated by the marginaliza-

tion of American literature and culture in the field of comparative

literature, and the persistence of a monolingual and exceptionalist

approach to literature in the field of American studies.

What are the intellectual and ideological underpinnings of

these disciplinary divides? How can the pedagogic and intellectual

boundaries between these disciplines be overcome? And

what can these fields learn from each other? In what follows, I wish

to explain their different disciplinary and intellectual trajectories in

sketching some answers to these questions. As a scholar whose

work straddles these fields, I am convinced that there is a lot to gain

both intellectually and academically from working against discipli-

nary divides and resisting the conventional compartmentalization.

The various reports on professional standards of the

American Comparative Literature Association provide a productive

context in which to consider the disciplinary assumptions and

transformations of the field of comparative literature, particularly

those that have enabled and perpetuated its differential mode of

identification with American studies. The 1965 Levin Report his-

toricized the emergence of comparative literature in the US in the

context of the National Defense Education Act that provided the

material support for foreign language instruction and the system-

atic introduction of programs and courses in great books to help

the younger generation of Americans understand and engage more

effectively with the international cross-currents and exchanges of

postwar years, as well as with the cultural and the political chal-

lenges of the Cold War era. Underscoring the inter-departmental

nature of the field, the report took an elitist attitude toward compa-

rative literature as a discipline by suggesting that only universities

with strong language departments and large libraries should insti-

tute them, as well as by underscoring the importance of solid train-

ing in three languages and literatures as the primary requisites for

pursuing a degree in the field. As the report bluntly stated, not

very many colleges, indeed not every university, can be fairly

expected to measure up to having a comparative literature

program (21). As well, the report posited an understanding of com-

parative literature as the study of literary phenomena from the per-

spective of more than one European national literature (primarily

English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish) with the aim of

mapping fundamental unities. The founding texts in the field,

including Erich Auerbachs 1946 Mimesis, Austin Warren and

Rene Wellecks 1949 Theory of Literature, and Leo Spitzers work

on stylistics, all focus on European literary traditions to posit a

universalist, unifying view of literature without any reference to

American Literary History 609

the sociohistorical forces in which it is inscribed. Both founding

and early scholars of comparative literature viewed the literary text

as self-contained, disregarding any other disciplines for its inter-

pretation or understanding, let alone considering its political or

ideological implications. Interestingly, in spite of its Eurocentric

and formalistic approach to literary studies, the Levin Report, in a

celebratory fashion, attributed the successful proliferation of com-

parative literature departments in the 1950s to American excep-

tionalism, stating that it is largely because of Americas cultural

pluralism, above all, its receptivity to Europeans and European

ideas, that we have been enabled to develop centers for the study

of Comparative Literature since the last war (25). Despite

embracing American exceptionalism, the report not only disregards

the American literary tradition altogether, but it also remains

oblivious to the significance of the historical and political context

of its own time, namely, the civil rights movement. As Edward

Said has remarked, the idea of comparative literature not only

expressed universality and the kind of understanding gained by

philologists about language families, but also symbolized the

crisis-free serenity of an almost ideal realm (Culture 45).

By the mid-1970s, comparative literature began to consoli-

date this form of disavowal by advocating a Eurocentric, ahistori-

cal, and apolitical approach to literary knowledge. The 1975

Greene Report is a perfect example of academic negation, at once

allowing into the disciplinary consciousness a cosmopolitan under-

standing of the field, while repressing the question of its condition

of possibility. The report replaces Levins notion of new interna-

tionalism with a cosmopolitanism vantage point to valorize

comparative literature as a field that could mingle faculty and

students across disciplinary boundaries and provide a broader

perspective on works and authors (28). The report even presci-

ently acknowledges the fact that A new vision of global literature

is emerging, embracing all the verbal creativity during the history

of our planet, a vision which will soon begin to make our comfort-

able European perspective parochial (30). And yet, in spite of

these salutary acknowledgments, the report rather quickly aban-

dons Levins self-reflexivity about comparative literatures discipli-

nary origins and delves into a kind of literary and formalistic

entrenchment that unabashedly rejects the idea of translation,

reduces the project of comparativism to literary studies by dismiss-

ing interdisciplinary works that involve a relaxing of discipline,

and shies away from embracing the study of literature at the

global level because of our lacking the concepts and tools that

will permit us to engage in the study of those literatures further-

flung from Europe and the Americas (36). As Said correctly

610 American Studies and Comparative Literature

observed, the field was epistemologically organized as a sort of

hierarchy, with Europe and its Latin Christian literatures at its

center and top (Culture 45). The literary entrenchment of the

Greene Report registers as politically reactionary when read in the

context of the ways the civil rights and womens movements as

well as the Vietnam War had radically politicized university cam-

puses throughout the US; in the wake of these shifts, the report

advocates a formalist and Eurocentric approach to literature fol-

lowing a symbolic but ultimately hollow recognition of

non-Western literary traditions and other interdisciplinary fields

such as American or Medieval studies. More broadly, comparative

literatures Eurocentrism and formalism at the time point to its

problematic inscription within a logic of Cold War politics that

rendered it politically conservative in spite of its apparent identifi-

cation with cosmopolitanism. Indeed, as Said remarked, a com-

placent ethnocentrism and covert Cold Warriorism began to take

root in comparative literature (Culture 47). It should come as no

surprise that the report concluded by recommending the constitu-

tion of a permanent Evaluation Committee to monitor every

comparative literature program in the country for the danger of

diluted excellence (Greene 36).

The Greene Report marked a turning point for comparative

literature and its relationship to American studies. The report is

symptomatic of the missed opportunities and possibilities that

could have brought the fields into a productive dialogue. On the

one hand, the reports Eurocentrism speaks to comparative litera-

tures failure to embrace American ethnic literatures at the time,

outsourcing instead the study of these flourishing literary traditions

to American studies and English departments, a move that I would

argue limited its institutional growth and development. On the

other hand, despite the reports recognition of interdisciplinarity as

a value, it resorted to a provincial formalism based on an

Orientalist tradition of philology that denied the possibility of

studying literature in relation to other modes of discourse. The

belated nature of the Bernheimer Report on Standards of

American Comparative Literature, published in 1993, eight years

after it was due, in an edited volume entitled Comparative

Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (1995) underscores the

tardiness of the fields embrace of multi-culturalism, as well as

its delayed recognition of ethnic and postcolonial literatures as

legitimate fields to study. In the 1980s, when English departments

began to fully integrate US ethnic and postcolonial literatures in

their curricula, comparative literature, in contrast, embraced high

theory as its disciplinary focus. Although as Kenneth Surin has

pointed out, the introduction of critical theorystructuralism in


the late 1970s, and deconstruction, poststructuralism, feminism,

psychoanalysis, and postcolonialism in the 1980s and 1990s

enabled a productive shift from a traditional kind of comp lit

toward a more intellectually ramified comparitism involving a

diverse range of theoretical paradigms, the embrace of high

theory also enabled the marginalization of the historical and the

social in comparative literature (70). Comparative literatures

privileging of the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure,

Roman Jakobson, and Roland Barthes, as opposed to more political

theories such as Marxism or the Frankfurt School, enabled a syn-

chronic approach to literary text that made any diachronic or politi-

cal interpretation impossible. Said correctly described the kind of

theoretical projects pursued by scholars of comparative literature at

the time as quietistic, uninterested in political questions and

[t]he life of society, or the life of society that bears centrally upon

texts and literature, and marked by a renunciation of everything

but the literary work and its problems (Interview 35).

While comparative literature has traditionally maintained a

literary focus that marginalizes the political, the social, and the

historical, American studies was founded on a nonbelletristic

approach to literature that draws from the fields of history, political

science, sociology, and art history. The germinating ideas for

American studies, as Gene Wise has demonstrated, can be traced

back to Vernon Louis Parringtons Main Currents in American

Thought (1927) in which Parrington suggested the broad path of

our political, economic, and social development, rather than the

narrower belletristic route for the study of American literature

and culture (iii). Parringtons consideration of literary and intellec-

tual movements in the context of their social and economic con-

texts and his attentiveness to the political and ideological

implications of literary texts have profoundly interpellated the field

of American studies, making its practitioners embrace a nonfor-

malistic approach to literature. Indeed, as Morton White has

argued, the first phase of American studies in the 1940s was

marked by a revolt against formalism (qtd. in Wise 298). All of

the early foundational texts in the field of American studies, such

as Henry Nash Smiths 1950 Virgin Land, Perry Millers 1953 The

New England Mind, Louis Hartzs 1955 The Liberal Tradition

in America, and R. W. B. Lewiss 1955 The American Adam,

integrated the literary and the historical, the political, and the

sociological. Early American scholars such as David Potter and

R. Gordon Kelly were deeply concerned with the sociohistorical

construction and the social function of literary texts, and thought-

fully adopted ideas from anthropology, sociology, and psychology

to contextualize and explicate American literature and history. As


Wise points out, even the most humanistic and literary-focused

practitioner in the field, Leo Marx, participated in an interdiscipli-

nary faculty research seminar at Minnesota in the mid-fifties and

published an essay on Literature and Covert Culture in 1957 that

is steeped in ideas from social sciences (322). In short, ever

since its foundation, the field of American studies has been

marked by an interdisciplinary ethos and by a keen sociohistorical

understanding of literary texts. Such an approach to literature

perhaps explains the fields early recognition of ethnic literatures

and histories as worthy of scholarly consideration as well as its

embrace of critical race theory and diaspora studies.

Despite its interdisciplinarity and openness to multicultural-

ism, however, the field of American studies has nonetheless main-

tained a monolingual and nationalist approach to literary studies,

an approach that has been enabled and perpetuated by the excep-

tionalist thesis. As Donald Pease has persuasively argued, since its

very inception, the field of American studies has relied on a logic

of exceptionalism that privileges the American society and nation

as historically and culturally unique, an imagined community

marked by the absence of class conflict, democracy, and individual

freedom. The discourse of American exceptionalism, he has

argued, monitored how American culture was studied, and it

regulated [the] processes of translatability both in the US and

abroad (49). The premise of exceptionalism, as Wai Chee

Dimock further explains, translates into a methodology that privi-

leges the nation above all else, affirming it as a conceptual founda-

tion, a criterion of membership underwriting and regulating an

entire intellectual field (269). Although in recent years scholars

have attempted to deconstruct the logic of American exceptional-

ism, the exceptionalist thesis has obdurately endured, and, as Pease

has shown, it has even at times been inadvertently perpetuated by

those who have most vigorously disavowed and critiqued it.1

My aim in critically sketching the different intellectual trajec-

tories and disciplinary formations of American studies and compa-

rative literature has been to argue that while comparative

literatures multinational and multilingual approach to literary

texts can free American studies from the logic of exceptionalism,

American studies nonbelletristic interdisciplinarity can provide

comparative literature with a model for a more situated and

worldly approach to literature. By way of conclusion, I would like

to provide a couple of examples of how such alternative

approaches might be pursued.

Comparative studies of postcolonial literatures of Maghreb,

Africa and the Caribbean provide an exemplary context to con-

sider how an American studies model can be useful to


comparitivists. Until now, students of comparative literature have

tended to read these literatures through the lens of postcolonial

theory, exploring how as hybrid texts they experiment with the

limits of identity, displacement, and work against racialization and

alterity. Seductive as such a postcolonial approach may be, it

proves too general and too ahistorical to be useful in reading these

literatures. As Maxim Silverman has cogently argued, the kind of

postcolonial identity politics which undergirds this approach pays

insufficient attention to the wider historical determinations of

identities, . . . occasionally loses sight of power relations alto-

gether in the effort to break the monolithic dualism of the master/

slave model, and often slips toward a liberal notion of a free

space of contestation outside the national/social complex (125).

Comparativists, I wish to suggest, can greatly benefit from reading

postcolonial texts contrapuntally with archival and historically sit-

uated studies of these issues. Works such as Elisa Camisciolis

Reproducing the French Race (2009), Max Silvermans

Deconstructing the Nation (1996), and William Barbieris Ethics

of Citizenship (1998) offer helpful models for such a contrapuntal

approach. Camiscioli, for example, through careful analyses of

legal and parliamentary debates, feminist literature, police and

army records, as well as demographic and medical works from the

early twentieth century, unearths the hierarchical social taxono-

mies that have characterized the discourses of race and immigra-

tion in France, elaborating the complex ways in which race and

gender differences were explicitly linked to a history of political

economy and national identity (4). Reproducing the French Race

is at once a genealogical exploration of how certain racial projects

in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were constitu-

tive of immigration policies in France and a biopolitical analysis

of the way the sexual and reproductive practices of French women,

as well as pronatalist politics, proved central to the project of

Republican citizenship. In Camisciolis text, a term such as bio-

politics is not simply invoked through a reference to Foucault,

but is actually mapped through a careful exploration of how

certain racial projects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries were constitutive of immigration policies in France and,

through a situated analysis of the way the sexual and reproductive

practices of French women as well as pronatalist politics, proved

central to the project of Republican citizenship.

I wish to cite Kate Baldwins Beyond the Color Line (2002) to

exemplify how a comparative and nonmonolingual approach to

American literature can enable the possibility of a post-exceptionalist

American studies. The book is a powerful contrapuntal inquiry into

the actualities of the black Atlantic, illuminating how the Soviet


Union and its communist ideology influenced the literary and

cultural works of major African-American writers, including

Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, and Paul

Robeson. Reading contrapuntally the works of these writers against

archival materials from Soviet sources, Baldwin demonstrates the

complex ways in which African-American intellectuals and writers

re-thought their exclusionary inscription within American society

and imagined a new form of internationalism marked by antiracism,

anticolonialism, and social democracy. Focusing on the experiences

of these writers, Baldwin carefully steers away from generalizing

and abstract theories of African-American diaspora and analyzes

how particular local and contextual encounters produce forms of

subjectivity that are transnational and oppositional. Beyond the

Color Line, therefore, not only corrects the celebratory accounts

of black diaspora offered by authors like Paul Gilroy and Stuart

Hall, but also demonstrates how American and Russian cultural

productions can be comparatively studied. Whether she is

reading McKays Russian texts, Hughess travelogue to the

Soviet Union, or the late writings of Du Bois, Baldwin furnishes the

reader with powerful insights into the production of African-

American diaspora, insights that work against easy readability and

transparent immediacy while shedding light on the forgotten

kinship between communism and antiracism. Beyond the Color

Line, in short, remarkably instances what one may call situated

comparative thinking, working through complex literary and theo-

retical issues with concrete examples. There are many highly theo-

retical reflections on black diaspora in the field of comparative

literature and numerous focused literary discussions of

African-American writers in the field of American studies, but

Baldwins work shows how these fields of inquiry can be rigorously

brought together in order to challenge the customary distinction

between literature and ideology, theory and practice, comparative

literature and American studies.

The proper role of the American humanist, Said remarked

in his posthumously published Humanism and Democratic

Criticism (2004), is not to consolidate and affirm one tradition

over all others. It is rather to open them all, or as many as possible,

to each other, to question each of them for what it has done with

the others, to show how in this polyglot country [that is, the US] in

particular many traditions have interacted (49). In other words,

the task of the American humanist is to oppose disciplinary and

nationalistic boundary-drawing and, instead, to read philologically

in a worldly and integrative, as distinct from separating or parti-

tioning, mode and, at the same time, to offer resistance to the great

reductive and vulgarizing us-versus-them thought patterns of our


time (50). Ironically, the predicament of disciplinary and intellec-

tual partitioning that Said warns us about has plagued even such

interdisciplinary fields as comparative literature and American

studies. The examples I have cited above model critical engage-

ment that works against disciplinary exclusivism and toward an

integrative and worldly approach to literary studies that attends to

the complex ways in which texts and representations are always

inscribed within a plurality of contexts and subject to heterogene-

ous realities, as Said argues. Such an approach to literary texts

engages the specificity of a work and the national and aesthetic tra-

dition to which it belongs while observing the possibility of its

inscription within a broader disciplinary or transnational context. A

situated comparative approach views the practice of reading and

interpreting as an unsettling adventure in difference, in alternative

traditions, in texts that need a new deciphering within a much

wider context than has hitherto been given them (55).

Note

1. In his essay, American Studies after American Exceptionalism? Pease

points to Djelal Kadirs 2004 inaugural address to the International American

Studies Association as a symptomatic example of this predicament, arguing that

the terms Kadir deploys to critique George W. Bushs bad American exception-

alism indeed perpetuate the exceptionalist doctrine by showing how Kadirs

criticism reinstitutes the [good] American exceptionlism that the Bush adminis-

tration had abandoned (53).

Works Cited

Baldwin, Kate A. Beyond the Color

Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading

Encounters between Black and Red.

Durham: Duke UP, 2002.

Bernheimer, Charles, ed. Comparative

Literature in the Age of

Multiculturalism. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins UP, 1995.

Camiscioli, Elisa. Reproducing the

French Race: Immigration, Intimacy,

and Embodiment in the Early

Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke UP,

2009.

Dimock, Wai Chee. War in Several

Tongues: Nations, Languages,

Genres. Edwards and Gaonkar

26982.

Edwards, Brian and Dilip Parameshwar

Gaonkar, eds. Globalizing American

Studies. Chicago: U of Chicago P,

2010.

The Greene Report, 1975.

Bernheimer 2838.

The Levin Report, 1965.

Bernheimer 2127.

Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main

Currents in American Thought: An

Interpretation of American Literature

from the Beginnings to 1920. Vol. I:

[T]the predicament of

disciplinary and

intellectual partitioning

. . . has plagued even

such interdisciplinary

fields as comparative

literature and American

studies. The examples . . .

work[. . .] against

disciplinary exclusivism

and toward an

integrative and worldly

approach to literary

studies that attends to the

complex ways in which

texts and representations

are always inscribed

within a plurality of

contexts and subject to

heterogeneous realities.


The Colonial Mind, 16201800.

New York: Harcourt, 1927.

Pease, Donald E. American Studies

after American Exceptionalism?

Toward a Comparative Analysis of

Imperial State Exceptionalisms.

Edwards Gaonkar 4783.

Said, Edward W. Interview.

Diacritics 6.3 (Autumn 1976): 3047.

. Culture and Imperialism.

New York: Knopf, 1993.

. Humanism and Democratic

Criticism. New York: Columbia UP,

2004.

Silverman, Maxim. Deconstructing the

Nation: Immigration, Racism, and

Citizenship in Modern France.

London: Routledge, 1996.

Surin, Kenneth. Comparative

Literature in America: Attempt at a

Genealogy. A Companion to

Comparative Literature. Eds. Ali

Behdad and Dominic Thomas.

Malden: Blackwell, 2011. 6572.

Wise, Gene. Paradigm Dramas in

American Studies: A Cultural and

Institutional History of the

Movement. American Quarterly 31.3

(1979): 293337.


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