Statement of the ACLA Executive Committee on Immigration Executive Order

By its nature, comparative literature is a discipline which demands dialogue within and across national borders. The free movement of students and scholars, to and from universities, academic conferences, and other places of research and teaching, is therefore of the utmost importance to our discipline. In turn, the discipline and practices of comparative literature are important for fostering mutual understanding and respect across and among cultures, languages, ethnicities, religions, and national boundaries.

The American Comparative Literature Association’s bylaws commit us to the support and strengthening of comparative literature studies, and emphasize that membership is open to anyone of any geographical, scholarly, and linguistic area who is interested in furthering our objectives. Our bylaws also commit us to aid individual members in their studies in comparative literature.

The Executive Committee of the ACLA remains firmly committed to those founding convictions. The executive order signed by the President on January 27 limits entry into the United States for refugees, and for those from seven predominantly Muslim nations. This same executive order also limits the travel of immigrants resident in the United States, again disproportionately affecting Muslim populations. This disrupts the work of scholars of comparative literature, and impedes research, teaching, and scholarly communication, most urgently for those of our members directly implicated in this order, but meaningfully for each of us, and for the discipline as a whole.

The mutual respect of individuals and communities, distinct in whatever ways, is a cornerstone of humanities scholarship generally and of comparative literature in particular. This order not only threatens our professional capacities to engage in dialogue with one another, but it threatens to damage and impede mutual understanding among peoples nationally and internationally.

The ACLA will continue to monitor closely the implications of this order and subsequent administrative actions. We will attempt to ensure that those affected by this order are able to participate in our annual meetings, both this summer in Utrecht, and in subsequent years, including facilitating virtual participation for those unable to travel because of this order. We will also advocate for and support, by the means available to us, scholars of comparative literature whose work and lives are affected by this order.

We join with our fellow learned societies in the United States, with many universities and colleges, as well as with many in the international community, in calling on the President and Congress to reverse this executive order and to denounce religious intolerance.

Here is a selection of studies published by current and former members of the ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory in 2016:

Paolo Bartoloni, Objects in Italian Life and Culture: Fiction, Migration, and Artificiality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan);

Vladimir Biti, Tracing Global Democracy: Literature, Theory, and the Politics of Trauma (Berlin: de Gruyter);

Assumpta Camps, La traducción en la creación del canon poético (Bern: Peter Lang);

Michel Chaouli, Thinking with Kant’s Critique of Judgement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP);

Ersu Ding, “Rethinking the Peircean Trichotomy of Icon, Index, and Symbol,” Semiotica 213: 165-75;

Angela Esterhammer, “John Galt’s The Omen: Interpretation and Its Discontents,” European Romantic Review 27.4: 489-503;

Pier Paolo Frassinelli , “Intersecting Temporalities, Cultural (Un)translatability and African Film Aesthetics,” Journal of African Cultural Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2016.1223538;

Jernej Habjan (co-ed. w. Fabienne Imlinger), Globalizing Literary Genres (New York: Routledge);

Jernej Habjan (co-ed. w. Suman Gupta and Hrvoje Tutek), Academic Labour, Unemployment and Global Higher Education (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan);

Péter Hajdu, “The Ethical Discourse of Tragedy and (Pseudo-)Historiography,” Forum for World Literature Studies 8.1: 32-40.

Eva Horn (co-ed. w. Peter Schnyder), Romantische Klimatologie (= Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 10.1);

Yvonne H. Howell and Françoise Lavocat, Factum contra fictionem (= Neohelicon 43.2);

Marko Juvan, Imaginarij Krsta v slovenski literaturi. Druga, popravljena in dopolnjena izdaja (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC);

György C. Kálmán, “Turning Points in Research: Systems and Theory,” Corela hors-série 19, DOI : 10.4000/corela.4536

Ulrike Kistner, “Cosmopolitanism and the Question of Sovereignty,” Neohelicon 43.2: 515–27;

Svend Erik Larsen, “Memory, Migration and Literature,” European Review 24.4: 509–22;

Françoise Lavocat, Fait et fiction : pour une frontière  (Paris: Seuil);

Françoise Lavocat (ed.), Interprétation littéraire et sciences cognitives (Paris: Hermann);

Françoise Lavocat (co-ed. w. Catherine Courtet, Mireille Besson and Alain Viala), Mises en intrigues (Paris: CNRS Éditions);

Joep Leerssen (co-ed. w. Luc van Doorslaer and Peter Flynn), Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology (Amsterdam: John Benjamins);

Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu (ed.), Matei Călinescu Festschrift (= The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 59);

Sangjin Park, A Comparative Study of Korean Literature: Literary Migration (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan);

Sowon S. Park (ed.), The Chinese Scriptworld and World Literature (= Journal of World Literature 1.2);

Bo Pettersson, How Literary Worlds Are Shaped: A Comparative Poetics of Literary Imagination (Berlin: de Gruyter);

Matthew Reynolds, Translation: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP);

Monika Schmitz-Emans (co-ed. w. Petra Gehring and Kut Röttgers), Abgründe (Essen: Die Blaue Eule);

Monika Schmitz-Emans (co-ed. w. Christian A. Bachmann and Laura Emans), Bewegungsbücher: Spielformen, Poetiken, Konstellationen (Berlin: Ch. A. Bachmann Verlag);

Robert Stockhammer, Afrikanische Philologie (Berlin: Suhrkamp);

Galin Tihanov, “Elias Canetti (1905-1994): A Difficult Contemporary,” in Makers of Jewish Modernity, ed. Jacques Picard et al. (Princeton: Princeton UP), 407-422;

Dominique Vaugeois, Malraux à contre temps : l’art à l’épreuve de l’essai (Paris: Jean-Michel Place);

Darío Villanueva (w. César Domínguez and Haun Saussy), Lo que Borges le enseñó a Cervantes: Una introducción a la literatura comparada (Barcelona: Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial);

Stefan Willer (co-ed. w Benjamin Bühler), Futurologien. Ordnungen des Zukunftswissens (Paderborn: Fink);

Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Anniversary Edition (Malden, MA: Wiley);

John Zilcosky, Uncanny Encounters: Literature, Psychoanalysis and the End of Alterity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP).