As a gift for his baptism in london, in february 1759, olaudah equiano records that he received a copy of Bishop Thomas Wilson's Essay towards an Instruction for the Indians (1740 [78]). The book's preface proclaimed the tract suitable for both “the Indians … a tractable People” and “[t]he very Hottentots, who are supposed to be the dullest of Mankind” (v, ix). At this point in his life story, Equiano has moved beyond the now famous “talking book” trope that marks the earlier sections of his autobiography to engage an emergent body of printed materials that were intended to speak to an interethnic cohort of potential Christian converts throughout the British Atlantic world.

The publication of ferdinand oyono's anticolonial novel une vie de boy (1956) in three scandinavian-language translations—danish, Swedish, and Nynorsk Norwegian—in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with a surge of pan-Nordic interest in African culture and liberation movements. This outward turn was part of a major shift in the construction of national and regional identities in the Nordic region—particularly in Denmark and Sweden. Once minor European kingdoms with modest colonial holdings on several continents (including Africa), these considerably downsized modern nation-states were forced to reposition themselves on the world stage starting in the twentieth century. Africa's anticolonial movements presented an opportunity for the Nordic region to embrace a new global role: that of nations of conscience whose leadership on human rights issues granted them influence and authority far beyond the size of their military, population, gross domestic product, or cultural and linguistic presence in the world. While the importance of this leadership among Western nations—particularly in fighting apartheid—can hardly be disputed, it has, paradoxically, also made it possible for Scandinavians to distance themselves from their own colonial involvement in Africa and to focus instead on the more extensive, visible, and enduring colonial histories of other European nations, mainly France and England.

On 25 november 2012, when the united states novelist jonathan franzen opened mexico's feria internacional del libro de guadalajara, he spoke of his experience of reading Latin American fiction. Asked about the region's representation through literature in English translation, Franzen stated that, magic realism having now “run its course,” Roberto Bolaño had become the “new face of Latin America.” Franzen's words echo what has almost become a commonplace in the United States over the last five years: naming Bolaño “the Gabriel García Márquez of our time” (Moore), after the publication by Farrar, Straus and Giroux of the translations of Los detectives salvajes (1998; The Savage Detectives [2007]) and his posthumous 2666 (2004; 2666 [2008]). Bolaño is also considered by many writers, critics, and readers in Latin America to be “reigning as the new paradigm” (Volpi, sec. 3). If in the United States market, through the synecdoche of literary commodification, García Márquez's revolutionary Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude [1970]) and, specifically, the magic realism of his fictional Macondo came to stand in for the diverse literary projects of Latin American authors in the 1960s, one must ask if a similar operation is taking place with Bolaño. While the number of translated Latin American literary works continues to be limited and most “go virtually unnoticed” (“Translation Database”), the significance of Bolaño's place at the center of a new canon in translation is magnified and necessitates inquiring into how his critical success in the United States market may be shifting the politics of translation of other texts. As a critic announced in 2011, “a second Latin American literature Boom is happening … [that] probably owes its existence to the explosion of the late-Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, whose popularity re-opened the door to North American publishing houses for Latin American authors” (Rosenthal).

Chimamandaadichie summarizes the current dilemma of the peripheral writer in thetitle of her recent ted talk: “The danger of a Single Story.” The talk's masterly braiding of ethos, pathos, and humor epitomizes the winning formula of this distinctively metropolitan media genre. But Adichie's rhetorical ingenuity interests us not as a cultural spectacle—the scene of a young African writer's anointment by metropolitan brokers as an upcoming “world writer”—but for what it structurally illuminates about the kind of minoritarian literary consciousness that gave birth to the concept of world literature. The speech begins by taking the audience down a well-trodden path, the story of Adichie's beginnings as a young writer in Nigeria—specifically, the naïveté of her childhood compositions: “All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out.” How deluded and childish it now seemed to Adichie, this business of putting cloudy skies and sumptuous apples in an African story. Luckily, African novelists like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye already existed to dispel her original disorientation, so that she learned to replace the landscapes of British and American fiction with familiar settings where “people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.”

It is in the context of race and revolution during china's long twentieth century that we can best understand the many implications of Ferdinand Oyono's Une vie de boy (1956) in China, where it was translated into the standard Sinitic script as (“The Life of a Boy Servant”) in 1984.

The cycle that had begun as a national strengthening movement in the 1890s achieved some kind of completion or vindication with the early-twenty-first-century rise of China on the world stage. Chinese sovereignty was not only achieved during this century but flaunted; revolutions were not only won but largely put aside. Throughout this process, racial thinking played a crucial role, but its significance has been largely ignored because of an all-consuming nationalism that justified itself through a discourse of wounding: China was the victim of Western imperialism and the object of racism. Racism was and is supposed to be a problem for other, principally Western nations, with tainted histories of slavery and imperialism—hence the failure to acknowledge that Chinese nationalism actually has a distinct, though shifting, racial character. Chinese racial nationalism, and, for a time, racial internationalism under Mao, was a major undercurrent in China's revolutionary sequence in the long twentieth century: the late Qing reform and the ensuing republican revolution of 1911, which overthrew the Manchu Qing dynasty; the communist revolution of 1949, which drove out Western and Japanese imperialism and overthrew the republican government; and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, the end of which started China on the path to postsocialism, or “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Two arguments about theory and comparative literature have been influential in recent years. on the one hand, there has been much talk of the “death of theory,” or the “end of theory,” or “post-theory” in the humanities. On the other hand, there is a “crisis” of comparative literature, perhaps a perennial condition, if it hasn't culminated in the “death of a discipline.” Under these circumstances, the question “What does the comparative do for theory?” assumes a poignant significance, which depends on what is meant by “comparative” and “theory.” To answer this question, I explore an epistemological category I call “comparativity”—that is, metacomparison or the theoretical potential of comparison—in contrast to the usual term “comparison.” If there is a crisis of comparative literature, it may be because we have moved too far from thinking comparativity as a way of knowing and engaging the world. Epistemology does not precede ontology, or ethics, or politics, but it is deeply involved in all of them. In this paper, I will argue for comparativity as at once an epistemological and metaepistemological mode of inquiry. Comparativity cannot be displaced or replaced by another disciplinary way of thinking, for comparativity is a trans- and metadisciplinary thought process, which by virtue of its self-critical reflexivity applies to all humanistic studies. My focus is therefore on the theoretical implications of comparativity.

This question of disciplinary meaning—which I ask from the viewpoint of the humanities generally—is larger than the question of disciplinary identity now preoccupying “DH” itself, as insiders call it. Having reached a critical mass of participants, publications, conferences, grant competitions, institutionalization (centers, programs, and advertised jobs), and general visibility, the field is vigorously forming an identity. Recent debates about whether the digital humanities are a “big tent” (Jockers and Worthey), “who's in and who's out?” (Ramsay), whether “you have to know how to code [or be a builder]” (Ramsay, “On Building”), the need for “more hack, less yack” (Cecire, “When Digital Humanities”; Koh), and “who you calling untheoretical?” (Bauer) witness a dialectics of inclusion and exclusion not unlike that of past emergent fields. An ethnographer of the field, indeed, might take a page from Claude Lévi-Strauss and chart the current digital humanities as something like a grid of affiliations and differences between neighboring tribes. Exaggerating the differences somewhat, as when a tribe boasts its uniqueness, we can thus say that the digital humanities—much of which affiliates with older humanities disciplines such as literature, history, classics, and the languages; with the remediation of older media such as books and libraries; and ultimately with the value of the old itself (history, archives, the curatorial mission)—are not the tribe of “new media studies,” under the sway of the design, visual, and media arts; Continental theory; cultural criticism; and the avant-garde new. Similarly, despite significant trends toward networked and multimodal work spanning social, visual, aural, and haptic media, much of the digital humanities focuses on documents and texts in a way that distinguishes the field's work from digital research in media studies, communication studies, information studies, and sociology. And the digital humanities are exploring new repertoires of interpretive or expressive “algorithmic criticism” (the “second wave” of the digital humanities proclaimed in “The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0” [3]) in a way that makes the field not even its earlier self, “humanities computing,” alleged to have had narrower technical and service-oriented aims. Recently, the digital humanities' limited engagement with identity and social-justice issues has also been seen to be a differentiating trait—for example, by the vibrant #transformDH collective, which worries that the digital humanities (unlike some areas of new media studies) are dominantly not concerned with race, gender, alternative sexualities, or disability.

Of the fourteen translations of Ferdinand Oyono's une vie de boy published to date, the Vietnamese translation, Đới Làm bồi, dates last, despite Vietnam and Cameroon's shared past under French colonialism. Nguyễn Như đat, the novel's Vietnamese translator, had anticipated that his version, published in 1997, would not find much of a market. The translator's pessimism was warranted, since the Vietnam of the late 1990s drastically differed from the two Vietnams of 1956, when Oyono's novel was originally published. Partitioned after the 1954 Geneva Accords and fighting against each other in the Second Indochina War, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the Republic of Vietnam in the south were unified at the war's end, in 1975, under a socialist government. But since 1986 Vietnam has been engaged in the capitalist world market, albeit under the banner of socialism. Given this context of market socialism, the Vietnamese translation of Oyono's anticolonial novel seems to have lagged temporally: it was published at a time when literary translations in Vietnam began trending away from anticolonialism and toward, for example, Raymond Carver's minimalism, Haruki Murakami's surreal handling of alienation, and, more recently, Vladimir Nabokov's perversely defamiliarizing style.

THE ORDINARY GLOSS WAS THE MOST WIDELY USED EDITION OF THE BIBLE IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES AND WELL INTO THE SIXTEENTH century. Medievalists know the commentary element as the Gloss to which theologians as diverse as Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, John Wyclif, and Martin Luther habitually referred. As the foremost vehicle for medieval exegesis, the Gloss framed biblical narratives for a wide range of vernacular religious literature, from Dante's Divine Comedy to French drama to a Middle English retelling of the Jonah story, Patience.

Most literary scholars based in the united states think of the postcolonial as a largely first and third world affair, neglecting the vast Second World and the socialist dynamics that shaped the postcolonial world in the decades after World War II. The Soviet Russian translation of Ferdinand Oyono's 1956 literary classic Une vie de boy highlights the sustained and complex interactions between the Soviet world and colonial and postcolonial Africa that have played an important role in the development of postcoloniality.

Comparative literature is unlike any other discipline. elsewhere—for example, in politics or religion—the comparative operates as a subdiscipline within a larger general discipline. The problem for comparative literature is that there is no general discipline of literature: institutionally, the discipline consists of nothing but the fragments of different languages. As a result, through a curious metonymic inversion, comparative literature has come to figure as the totalizing general discipline of which it should form a part. This is why it also seems to offer a natural home for the idea of Weltliteratur. Comparative literature promises the Utopian recreation of the lost amphora of literature as it stood before its fall into the clutches of the nation.