Comparison—the title itself, separated momentarily from the qualifying Theories, Approaches, Uses of the subtitle, is a Conradian plunge into the deep, deep sea of what the editors, Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, call comparative “epistemology, aesthetics, politics.” Initially, the book seems to promise too much: not simply an overview of the evolving methods and disciplinary histories of comparative analysis in the humanities, but a dalliance (in sixteen chapters) with comparison as cognitive and affective DNA. “Comparison, like translation, is a risky business, but also an ethical and political imperative,” reads the introduction. But comparison is not intrinsically risky, and it is through the act of comparing comparison to translation that the authors are appealing to a consensual, though not widely shared, sense of “risky business.” Ethical and political imperatives, made relatable later in the sentence, are also not automatically so. The excess of meaning of the title, however, is expertly delimited, historicized, and particularized in the course of the chapters. This collection of essays, which has been developed from a special issue of New Literary History, balances general exegesis with exemplary instances of comparison and its discontents.

The book is divided into three sections of variable lengths: rationale; uses and abuses; and comparison in the disciplines. There are interesting continuities and resemblances among the sections. Radhakrishnan’s argument that comparisons should work against “the hegemony of centrism” resonates well with Stam and Shohat’s, as well as with Linda Gordon’s assertions that (American) exceptionalism is a refusal to compare the nation-state with any other, and Mignolo’s insight that comparative methodology must be delinked from “zero-point epistemology,” foundational knowledge systems that masquerade as universally true and timeless. Affinities also emerge in conceptualizations of a comparativism “to come.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak envisions the full-scale substitution of “anthropologistic comparativism” with deep language learning that must “implode into a simulacrum of lingual memory.” Shu-mei Shih’s linking of Faulkner’s South with the historical depredations of Caribbean and Latin American slavery urges a relational comparison that trades in historical, if not linguistic, equivalences. Loomba’s reading of caste as race urges new associative models that challenge “the irreversibility of comparative terms,” itself a remainder of the Eurocentric view of history.

Comparison efficiently draws attention to influential work on comparison and comparative studies outside literary studies. These “juxtapositions of difference,” as Layoun describes it, testify to historical contingencies when they are not “of our own interested making.” The work of Handler, Benedict, and Bretell offer alternative comparatist approaches to positivist and monocentric anthropology, while Gordon espouses “light” comparison—“unbalanced, unequal, partial”—as a model for comparative historical work. A wide range of critical responses are proffered by way of situating (and claiming the relevance of) comparative practices in the world outside the classroom. Walkowitz charts the rise of a genre of transnational literature that is “born translated,” genetically modified to circulate instantly and simultaneously in different languages. Comparison in academic institutions, Pheng Cheah claims, is the epiphenomenon of infrastructural processes of comparison. Imaginative literature too is compromised by the comparison machine. Bruce Robbins powerfully argues that though comparison—like cosmopolitanism—may be distorted “by differentials of power,” neither should stop practicing. Refusing the conceptual stumbling blocks posed by “incomparability” and “incommensurability,” Robbins urges a “measured embrace of comparison” for a revitalized cosmopolitanism and “more strength.”

“The step away from putative universalism is needed. But what is it a step toward?” asks Haun Saussy. Comparison seems less sanguine of the futures of comparison than it is of its colonial past and unevenly decolonizing present. It cautiously differentiates good comparison from bad, sorts out the emergent from the dominant, but devotes little critical attention to the specificities of new comparative practices, directions, and experiments in, say, world literature. We should perhaps be as critical of habits of omission that come in the way of cross-national and cross-cultural comparison as we are of the fantasies of commission Longxi describes in his essay: killing distant strangers and Chinese Mandarins. For a collection that self-reflexively worries the position of the comparer, and includes an impressive range of disciplinary perspectives and intellectual formations, the excursiveness of its theories, approaches, and uses seems to be ultimately rooted in the US academy. Only one contributor is from “elsewhere.”