¹ As will become obvious, my comments here are really directed toward the state of the field for the study of modern Arabic literature. As a “field,” the study of classical Arabic literature is more complete than it is for the modern period—and thus some, if not much, of what I will say regarding field construction does not apply in the same way.

² It is important to stress that “theory,” as practiced in North American comparative literature departments, is a bounded canonical object, dominated by a familiar set of founding figures (Freud, Benjamin, Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Kristeva, Derrida, de Man, Althusser, Foucault, and others) working within a particular continental tradition of language and philosophy. While ever evolving, it retains a disciplinary—and disciplining—force on the field, excluding entire sets of questions (and those figures who ask such questions), just as it enables others. Like any self-conscious tradition, much of its work is devoted to illustrating its primacy no matter the question; like any tradition, it polices its borders against foreign intruders.

³ See Harootunian, Harry, “Postcoloniality's Unconscious/Area Studies’ Desire,” Postcolonial Studies 2 (1999): 127–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁴ See the ACLA reports of 1993 and 2003: Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. C. Bernheimer (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); and Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, ed. H. Saussy (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

⁵ Given that most work done under the banner of “postcolonial studies” has focused exclusively on Europhone literatures, the place of other traditions, including Arabic-language literature, within that corpus has yet to be worked out.

⁶ In Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak situates her critique of the “discipline” of comparative literature at the most abstract level—almost as a set of thoughts hovering over the workplace. However, thinking of “institutions” rather than “disciplines” concretizes the problem she describes and shows how complicated and ambiguous the relationship between the two can be. For instance, at the national level, just as the two professional associations of the literary disciplines (ACLA and MLA) have made space for conversations involving modern Arabic and other global South literatures, many comparative literature departments still would not think of employing a single specialist in a non-European literature. And while it is not uncommon for a comparative literature department to employ multiple specialists for each European language, most have effectively imposed a moratorium against hiring more than one scholar per non-European language. The imbalances at the departmental level are multiple. To take the most notable example, like their colleagues working from/on/in the global South, Arabist comparatists must also know (and teach) at least one European literary and intellectual tradition; the converse rarely applies to Europeanist comparatists. The pattern suggests that while the national associations have gone to great lengths to reconsider how non-Western literatures challenge the discipline itself, at the local level comparative literature departments have responded in merely an aggregative way—they have done nothing more than add them to an existing curriculum self-consciously rooted in European studies.

⁷ There is a wide body of post-post-structuralist (or “new empiricist”?) theory—including the work of Timothy Mitchell, Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law—that grapples explicitly with this very issue. Though this theory is commonly ignored in the comparative literature canons of theory, it could be marshaled to support the project of field construction I have outlined.