Locations of China in World Literature

Abstract

When David Pan of the University of California, Irvine, invited me to participate in a colloquium series of multiple lectures on “China and the West: Methodologies for Comparison” in 2020–2021, I gladly accepted, in most part to learn of my colleagues’ newest ideas about comparison. Much new theorization has been done on comparison, including comparison as relation.1 However, I feel that the methodological emphasis on approaches to the comparison of China with the West may have distracted our attention from an equally important issue of locations of comparison.2 China scholars are located differently in terms of geography and language when comparing China with the West than their Western counterparts, who would prefer to compare China in the West, which boasts of a long tradition of elite intellectualism that granted a culture like China very little space for comparison vis-à-vis the West. More recently, issues of locations in comparison have surfaced in the ongoing debates surrounding world literature, which have generated great enthusiasm in the non-West and both enthusiasm and anxiety for the West, as I will illustrate below.3