Comparison and Postcoloniality

Summary

Abstract: In her article “Comparison and Postcoloniality” Natalie Melas discusses comparative literature's forgotten relation to the positivist comparative method. Comparison was Eurocentric by exclusion when it applied only to European literature and Eurocentric by discrimination when it adapted evolutionary models to place European literature at the forefront of human development. Melas argues that inclusiveness is not a sufficient response to postcolonial and multiculturalist challenges because it leaves the basis of equivalence unquestioned. The point is not simply to bring more objects under comparison, but, rather, to examine the process of comparison. Melas offers a new approach to the either/or of relativism and universalism, in which comparison is either impossible or assimilatory, by focusing instead on various forms of “incommensurability”—comparisons in which there is a ground for comparison but no basis for equivalence.

Introduction

The qualifier “comparative” has its origin in what was considered one of the great innovations of scholarship in the nineteenth century, the comparative method. Applied across disciplines, it provided a comprehensive and systematic approach to the totality of objects in a given field and replaced the directionlessness of a merely taxonomic comparison with a positivist evolutionary teleology. When, in the course of the twentieth century, comparative literature turned away from studying all the literature in the world, its adjectival appendage lost the positivity of its reference to the comparative method.