ODIOUS COMPARISONS

... ACROSS & BEYOND THE EARLY GLOBAL WORLD

April 17-April 18 2026 [In Person]

CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, UCLA

Organized by Basil Arnould Price (John W. Baldwin Postdoctoral Fellow, CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, UCLA)

and Nancy Alicia Martínez (Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature, UCLA)

 In his 1996 essay “Why Comparisons Are Odious”, W.J.T. Mitchell observed that if “difference and identity are the potent and inevitable terms in a new comparativism grounded in culture, it may be important to remind ourselves how insidious comparison can be, how invidious and odious.” Although written in response to the emergence of comparative cultural studies, Mitchell’s essay points to both the risks of comparison as well as how the oft-acknowledged ‘odiousness of comparison’ delimits the critical horizons of comparative and early global studies. In the past few decades, comparativists have interrogated the historical and ideological frameworks that structure the criterion by which we compare and what we hope the comparative will do, politically and intellectually – especially as our fields grapple with the historical entanglement of the comparative method in settler colonial, imperial, and racist histories.

Clusters of articles in PMLA (Summer, 2013) and a decade later in Comparative Literature (Fall, 2023)examined the risks and limitations of comparative work, but also asked whether comparative methods could help to decolonize the academy by producing nonhierarchical dialogues between literatures, even those which were seen as incomparable. Similar conversations have emerged within early global studies, despite the historical dismissal of transtemporal, transcultural comparative work as lacking ‘rigor’ or as ‘anachronistic’, which has often resulted in the systematic exclusion of scholars who question the dominant epistemologies, methodologies, and politics of the field. However, recent work has illustrated the ways in which the early world confounds conventional periodization, unsettles national boundaries, and blurs disciplinary boundaries, necessitating interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives on the texts and contexts of the distant past. Although comparative work in premodern studies typically focuses on historically-verifiable instances of interconnection, translation, scholars such as Adam Miyashiro [Kānaka Maoli], Zrinka Stahuljak, and Rebecca de Souza have argued persuasively that asynchronous, disconnected, transcultural comparisons can provide methods for a truly global, decolonized medieval studies. 

By seeking dialogue between the fields of comparative literature and early global studies, this two-day symposium, sponsored by the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) explores not just what makes comparison odious but also asks what is generative about odious comparisons. 

In his influential Comparing the Incomparable (2008 [Comparer l'incomparable, 2002]), Marcel Detienne challenges the assumption that “only that which is comparable can be compared”, rejecting the assumption that the comparables only emerge from “neighboring societies, bordering one another, that have progressed, hand-in-hand, in the same direction, or […] at first glance present enough similarities for one to proceed safely” (23). Haun Saussy, responding to Detienne in Are We Comparing Yet? (2019), observes that even if “comparison becomes questionable” when it is not “a matter of common sense”, “the tacit criterion of “comparability” […] is designed to prevent the kinds of discovery that emerge from remote comparisons” (44). By drawing out what Wai-Chee Dimock calls ‘resonances’ – the ways in which a text signifies across time, its surprising echoes in strange contexts – how can we challenge comparisons premised on causation or chronology? In experimenting with comparative approaches to the early global past which are unshackled from the necessity of linearity, continuity, or connectivity, this symposium asks whether we can compare apples and oranges, and how such comparisons might generate new, destabilizing ways of knowing. 

We seek contributions which make ‘unexpected’ comparisons – in the sense of Phillip J. Deloria [Yankton Dakota]  – to problematize the categorical assumptions of our disciplines and reveal the ideological work that the criteria of ‘comparability’ produce. We welcome submissions from any area of early global studies that pursue comparisons which are multiple, relational, ambivalent, incompatible, fragmented, ephemeral, discontinuous, and dissonant to rethink the methods of our fields. We encourage work which examines how (dis)ability, gender, Indigeneity, race, sexuality, and sovereignty are imbricated in comparative studies of the past and present.

Some issues of methodology you might consider:

• Disciplinary or institutional histories of comparability, or of contexts, forms, and genres deemed incomparable. 

• Comparisons elided and produced by retroactive, modern periodizations (e.g. 'gothic'; 'medieval'; 'pre-contact'). 

• Comparisons that complicate early and modern conceptions of regionality (e.g. Abiayala; east/west; Global North/South).

• Transhistorical fictions of empire, nation, or regionality and their relevance to comparative studies. 

• Transtemporal resonances that disrupt teleological narratives of historical development (e.g. histories of genres, relationships between oral and written storytelling, survivals in unexpected forms and contexts). 

• Problematizing the connections between racialized experiences in the early global past and modernity.

• Indigenous epistemologies as disruptive of comparative paradigms (e.g. concepts of "writing" vs. "knowledge recording"; etuaptmumk; Indigenous perspectives on post-materialist anthropology)

• Deterritorialization and affective responses to the early global past, which inform and reshape how comparison is enacted (e.g. trans intercorporeal archives; queer touches across time; wake-work). 

• Historical thinking in ‘bad’ adaptations and their intended and unintended synthesis of ideas (e.g. amateurism, ‘dirt bag medievalism’; reading, writing, and performing creative anachronisms). 

The conference will be held in-person at the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Alongside traditional, individually presented 20-minute papers, we welcome joint proposals and innovative styles of presentation. As this symposium seeks to provide opportunities for surprising comparisons and collaborations, across disciplinary boundaries and institutional hierarchies, each of the sessions will feature two presentations and a respondent (from our community of scholars at UCLA) who will put these presentations into a generative, comparative, dialogue. As such, participants will be asked to submit drafts of their papers to the respondents ahead of the conference (by 16 March 2025), which will in part serve as a workshop for preparing this work for possible publication, targeted for either a volume in Brepols’ Cursor Mundi series or as a cluster of articles in Viator. The final session will be a roundtable, in which all presenters and participants will have the opportunity to reflect upon the themes of the conference, and their engagement with comparisons that are incompatible, impossible, or invidious. 

To propose a presentation for this conference, please submit an abstract (approx. 250-300 words), a paper title, and biographical note[s] (approx. 100 words), to odiouscomparisons.2026@gmail.com by 30 April 2025.

Read the full CFP HERE [bit.ly/OdiousComparisonsCFP], and see our event page HERE (https://cmrs.ucla.edu/event/odious-comparisons-across-beyond-the-early-g...).