Comparative Literature and the Genocide in Palestine

This article interrogates the role of comparative literature in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. What can comparative literature do against the genocide? I answer this question with reference to the work of Refaat Alareer. Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, Alareer was killed by a targeted Israeli airstrike on 6 December 2023. I argue that Alareer’s scholarship should be understood as part of the militant anticolonial genealogy of ‘Global South comparatism’ that Hala Halim traces back to the journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings. Alareer builds on the three models of literary comparison pursued by one of Lotus’s most famous contributors, Ghassan Kanafani: comparison as conflict, comparison as solidarity, and comparison as reattachment. Each of these three models illustrates how comparative literature can resist colonial violence. UK Higher Education institutions are complicit in endorsing and enforcing Israel’s colonial violence, and therefore also in Israel’s attempts to destroy Kanafani’s and Alareer’s tradition of anticolonial comparatism. The project of ‘Global South comparatism’ lives on close to the sites of struggle that have developed despite and against the (Western) academy: in Palestine itself, and in the Palestine solidarity movement worldwide.