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Native Sons and Native Speakers: On the Eth(n)ics of Comparison

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Yung-Hsing Wu
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Abstract

Why should comparison be an act laden with ethical obligation? Readers of ethnic literatures have long insisted that doing justice to these literatures must be a tenet central to work calling itself ethnic studies. I argue for a renewal of that sense of obligation: the difference of ethnicity is an occasion for articulating, juxtaposing, and reworking the relations among otherwise separate ethnic literary traditions. To the extent that difference follows a logic of intertextuality–one of crossing, exchange, and perpetual expansiveness–it enables reading ethnic literatures together even as it emphasizes the ethical difficulties of such a reading practice. From the disciplinary discourse of comparative literature to the metatextual commentary in Richard Wright's “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” and ultimately to the pragmatic context of an intertextual reading, this essay seeks to suspend ethnic difference from its position as a point of permanent untouchability. (Y-HW)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 121 , Issue 5 , October 2006 , pp. 1460 - 1474
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2006

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