Horizontal Comparison

Reviews / Votes

"Cajetan Iheka's Horizontal Comparison is a rich intervention into a number of fields that should be interlinked but often aren't, with African literature, Caribbean literature, Black Atlantic studies, postcolonialism, and world literature chief among them. In rejecting a singular conception of 'world,' it insists on the particular aptness of African-Caribbean textual pairings to demonstrate a multiple, overlapping, and non-hierarchical ideal of worldly engagement. By homing in on the layered and longstanding conversation between African and Caribbean writers, Iheka draws out the full reach of their methodological and transcendental significance to literary studies and literary thought. The book's aim is not simply to redress past marginalization of African and Caribbean texts and writers, but to demonstrate what happens, relationally, when marginalization ceases to be a driving preoccupation." -- Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Johns Hopkins University "Horizontal Comparison is an engaging and provocative book about the need to reframe the world literature debate to accommodate Black Atlantic writing and thought. Heeding a growing scholarly call to reimagine south-south literary exchange and thereby to challenge a presumption that metropolitan gatekeepers have the right to consecrate cultural objects, Iheka brings the mutual concerns of African and Caribbean writers into lateral conversation. African and Caribbean literature share an investment in the counterfactual, the hypothetical, the otherwise, and the otherworldly. They participate in generative worldmaking exercises that force us to see how things might be, in addition to how things have been and how they are now." -- Peter Kalliney, University of Kentucky