Comparative Literature's Cold War (ACLA 2025)

Organizer: Cate Reilly

What is the place of Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies in the comparative literary inquiry? Of comparative literary inquiry, with its emphasis on theory and the critical praxis of the left, in a Slavic, Eurasian and East European regional and linguistic contexts? At the opening of Death of a Discipline (2003), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s study of the complex relationship between Comparative Literature and Area Studies, Spivak pauses to historicize the transformations Comparative Literature and Area Studies experienced in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Attentive to her book’s moment in time (she first conceived it as a 1999 MLA talk), she focalizes the diverse ways in which comparative literary history was shaped by the end of the Cold War. 

• To what extent are postcolonial and decolonial theoretical models focused on imperialism adequate interpretive frameworks to describe a post-socialist regional paradigm sharing certain features with the British, French, and Spanish empires, but not reducible to them? What other critical paradigms might be possible?


• How should the Russian Federation’s twenty-first century incursions into Ukraine be understood in relationship to other co-emergent global conflicts, particularly in the Middle East?


• What can be made of the fate and frustrations of so-called Second and Third-World alignments of the 1960s and 1970s that temporarily configured an anti-imperialist internationalism for the present?


• How to read a new Eastern European diaspora?


• In what ways might eco-criticism, environmental humanities, and research on the Anthropocene need specific tools to attend to the vast body of melting permafrost in the former Eastern Bloc? Which tools?


• How should the history of women’s movements on the left be theoretically integrated with contemporary struggles over reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, and LGBTQ+ struggles in Eastern Europe?


• What role does socialist realism play in configuring contemporary fiction focused on class but not directly traceable to the project for a leftist literary commons?


• How should scholars engage critically and theoretically with Slavic languages and traditions other than Russian, as traditionally prioritized by the Cold War Area Studies model of inquiry?


• Whither is “nuclear criticism” (Derrida) in an era of renewed nuclear threat