This conference explores the promise and challenges of South-South comparativism. By critically examining the histories, repertoires, and methods of South-South exchange, the conference aims to assess how this paradigm reconfigures the geographies of comparison, as well as its epistemological and political grounds. Our approach seeks to move beyond traditional binaries of center and periphery, to encompass cross-regional dialogues across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East, as well as comparisons within regions and traditions.

What determines which regions, texts, or traditions are brought into dialogue, and how do these choices shape the narratives and frameworks we produce? Participants are encouraged to explore the modalities of producing and interrelating literatures/literary approaches that have emerged and are still emerging within the Global South as alternatives to the theories and practices of comparative literature in Euro-America, which have for a long time dominated literary notions and sensibilities as well as the practices of reading, contextualizing, and theorizing.

The two-day conference will be divided into a workshop and four panels. The workshop will discuss the legacies of Afro-Asianism, while the panels will turn attention to other South-South exchanges and solidarities as well as the archives, repertoires, and methodology of South-South comparison.

Program:

DAY 1, JULY 2
9:30 Welcome address, Beatrice Gruendler & the organizers

Panel 1
09:40 – 11:00 South-South Solidarities  Moderator: Estefanía Bournot

• Anaheed Al-Hardan (Howard University): “Recovering African-Asian Anti-Colonialism”
• Anne Garland Mahler (University of Virginia): “A Wide Net of Solidarity: Antiracism and Anti-Imperialism from the Americas to the Globe”

Discussant: Sebastian Conrad (Freie Universität Berlin)

11:00 – 11:15 Coffee Break

Panel 2
11:15 – 12:35 Afro-Asianism and Its Legacies I Moderator: Johannes Stephan

• Dilip Menon (University of Witwatersrand): “Insurrection of Subordinated Imaginations: Afro Asia for our Times”
• Annette Damayanti Lienau (Harvard University): “Literature, Afro-Asianism, and the Comparative South: From Bandung to Reformasi and the Mass Protest Decade”

Discussant: Beatrice Gruendler (Freie Universität Berlin)

12:35 – 14:00 Lunch

Panel 3
14:00 – 16:00 Afro-Asianism and Its Legacies II Moderator: Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra

• Judhajit Sarkar (University of Heidelberg)
• “An Indologist as Afro-Asianist: The ‘Africanism’ of Suniti Kumar Chatterji”
• Carmina Yu Untalan (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa) “Unsettling Emanations: On the Spectrality of Comparison in the Anti-Colonial Praxis of Rizal and Cabral”
• Hala Halim (New York University): “An Exemplary Career Translating the Afro-Asian:Nehad Salem”

Discussant: Mahmoud Al-Zayed (Freie Universität Berlin)

16.00 – 16:30 Coffee Break

Panel 4
16.30 – 18:30 Repertoires of Comparison and Method I Moderator: Mahmoud Al-Zayed

• Rosario Hubert (Trinity College): “Revolutionary Repertoires”
• Michael Allan (University of Oregon): "Cinema from Below? The Lumière Brothers and the Labor of Representation."
• Preeti Singh (Duke University): “Emergency/ Emergence: Cold War Aesthetics and the Politics of Decolonization in Anand Patwardhan’s Seventies Documentaries”

Discussant: Arvind Rajagopal (New York University)

19:00 Dinner

Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies- Free University - Hittorfstrasse 18, 14195 Berlin

DAY 2, JULY 3

Panel 5
10:15 – 12:15 South-South Methodologies Moderator: Johannes Stephan

• Ipshita Chanda (English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad): “Learning to Listen to Silence: Comparative Practice in a Plural World”
• Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (Pennsylvania State University): “Cross-Correlations: On Comparison, Borrowing, and Other Forms of Exchange across the South Atlantic”
• Estefanía Bournot (Austrian Academy of Sciences): “Specularity: Notes on Othering Otherwise”

Discussant: Anupama Rao (Columbia University) 

12:15 – 13:30 Lunch

Panel 6
13:30 – 14:50 Repertoires of Comparison and Method II Moderator: Estefanía Bournot

• Gilbert Ndi Shang (University of Bayreuth): “‘Resource’ Literature: Relational Networks of South-South Textualities”
• Zakariae Bouhmala (Mohammed I University, Oujda): “Africa Rethought: A South-South Comparative Analysis of Existence, Identity, and Resistance in Moroccan and Afro-Caribbean Novels”

Discussant: Kai Kresse (ZMO & Freie Universität Berlin)

supported by: 

Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Dahlem Humanities Center, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Einstein-Stitung (alphabetical order)

Zeit & Ort

02.07.2025 - 03.07.2025

Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies
Hittorfstr. 18
1195 Berlin

Weitere Informationen

Dr. Mahmoud Al-Zayed