ABSTRACT
Reflecting on formulating a fresh agenda for comparative study, Harry Haroo-tunian (2005) has argued that analyses in the humanities and interpretative social sciences are increasingly marked by a privileging of spatial categories with an accompanying decline in addressing questions of temporality. For Harootunian, the dominance of a range of static, space-specific categories— such as culture, civilization, modernity, nation, center and periphery, area and region, global and empire—have banished considerations of the temporal to produce a situation in which effect is routinely substituted for cause, the explanatory potential of the interpretive sciences is stymied and comparative analysis, working with spatial categories, has naturalized rather than analyzed capitalism’s necessarily segmenting and uneven character. Harootunian elucidates how this troubling state of affairs has emerged in a wide range of scholarship. For instance, identifying modernity as a spatial category, restricted to Europe, has produced the logic of alternative modernities; understanding the globe as the requisite frame for any number of analyses has naturalized rather than explained the concept. The dominant tendency of area studies to inquire into the specificities of national and native cultures has served to essentialize culture and suture it to space; more recently, some postcolonial theory has replicated this very move and also essentialized culture as space-specific. Finally, by Harootunian’s account, an overvaluation of the spatial categories of nation, region or area that underwrites much work on diaspora and migration conceives of border crossings and hybrid identities in primarily spatial terms, and the still prevalent logics of modernization and developmentalism misrecognize the unevenness produced by and necessary to capitalism as, instead, inhering in and deriving from specific spaces.
