Horizontal Comparison - by Cajetan Iheka (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

By analyzing African and Caribbean texts on their own terms, Horizontal Comparison articulates new forms of transoceanic solidarity.

The fields of comparative literature and Black Atlantic studies have an Africa problem: despite sustained attempts to decenter Western paradigms, they still privilege the United States and Europe as the primary loci of reference. So argues Cajetan Iheka in Horizontal Comparison, which aims to redirect both fields toward a non-hierarchical, South-South orientation focusing on the links between Africa and the Caribbean.

By analyzing the literary work and real-life trajectories of writers such as Peter Abrahams, Chimamanda Adichie, Maryse Condé, Buchi Emecheta, Jamaica Kincaid, Claude McKay, Dinaw Mengestu, Ferdinand Oyono, Taiye Selasi, and Sam Selvon, Iheka draws our attention to the ways in which African and Caribbean texts inform and mutually constitute each other, bypassing the usual comparisons to Western literary canons. The book challenges not only Western cultural hegemony in the study of global Black writing but also the very methodologies of comparative literary studies, offering fresh insights into reading, trauma, character, and the "worlding" of literature.

Review Quotes

"Cajetan Iheka's Horizontal Comparison is a rich intervention into a number of fields that should be interlinked but often aren't, with African literature, Caribbean literature, Black Atlantic studies, postcolonialism, and world literature chief among them. In rejecting a singular conception of 'world, ' it insists on the particular aptness of African-Caribbean textual pairings to demonstrate a multiple, overlapping, and non-hierarchical ideal of worldly engagement. By homing in on the layered and longstanding conversation between African and Caribbean writers, Iheka draws out the full reach of their methodological and transcendental significance to literary studies and literary thought. The book's aim is not simply to redress past marginalization of African and Caribbean texts and writers but to demonstrate what happens, relationally, when marginalization ceases to be a driving preoccupation."

"Horizontal Comparison is an engaging and provocative book about the need to reframe the world literature debate to accommodate Black Atlantic writing and thought. Heeding a growing scholarly call to reimagine south-south literary exchange and thereby to challenge a presumption that metropolitan gatekeepers have the right to consecrate cultural objects, Iheka brings the mutual concerns of African and Caribbean writers into lateral conversation. African and Caribbean literature share an investment in the counterfactual, the hypothetical, the otherwise, and the otherworldly. They participate in generative worldmaking exercises that force us to see how things might be, in addition to how things have been and how they are now."

About the Author

Cajetan Iheka is professor of English at Yale University, where he specializes in African and Caribbean literatures, ecocriticism, ecomedia, postcolonial literatures, and world literatures. He is author or editor of seven books, including Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature and African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics. He is also editor of Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media and coeditor of African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space and Intellectual Traditions of African Literature, 1960-2015.