Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The main argument of this paper concerns the act of literary comparison as a form of collectiveness oriented toward future liberation. This form of collectiveness stems from interpreting the figure of return in the Arabic 1953 poem “Sana’ud” (We Shall Return) by the Palestinian ‘Abd al-Karmi al-Karmi. The paper claims that the return in al-Karmi’s poem is a figure of a poetic community’s future. Al-Karmi’s poem is compared to the 1961 Portuguese poem “Havemos de Voltar” (We Shall Return) by the Angolan Agostinho Neto. Beyond their titles, the rationale for this comparison are similarities in their historical conditions and similarities in the features of the idea of return. Both poets are also connected through their association with the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association (AAWA), a literary-solidarity organization founded in the late 1950s. The paper also discusses features of the AAWA, firstly, for introducing another basis for the Palestinian-Angolan comparison, and secondly, for comparing both poems with the AAWA’s own idea of a poetic community’s future. Lastly, the study investigates Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s 2003 book, Death of a Discipline, and the figure of the new Comparative Literature. This investigation leads to the notion of comparatism offered in the book as related to collectiveness and the future. This notion supports a dual argument concerning Spivak’s book and the other texts in this paper: the comparison itself is a manifestation of a poetic community’s future; Spivak’s notion of comparatism as belonging to a poetic community’s future that can find its location in Global South literature.