ABSTRACT
Starting from the intrinsic cosmopolitanism of comparative literature, this chapter focuses on how migrant intellectuals and scholars displaced from peripheral spaces and cultures have influenced literary studies. The cosmopolitan standpoint requires a simultaneous recognition of specificity, a celebration of locality and a propensity for placing them under erasure in global negotiations. The resultant market of ideas is analyzed as “accented theory,” with a nod to Hamid Naficy’s “accented cinema,” defined as a particular form of cinema created by diasporic, exilic, deterritorialized people. The semantic, linguistic, and cultural translations involved in creating comparative theory and practice are very similar to what Naficy describes. Parallel monologues of national literatures come into the open, uneven, intricate, and crisscrossed field of comparative literature not only by creating analogies and comparisons but also by exporting cosmopolitan thinkers, who are the best negotiators of cultural meaning and symbolic prestige. By their ability to acknowledge situatedness beyond the traditional binarism national vs. international, exilic or migrant theorists, factual settlers of the imagined cosmopolitan community, shape not only comparative literature but also new categories for thinking the relationship between space and movement, in whatever forms it may occur.
