Horizontal Comparison

By analyzing African and Caribbean texts on their own terms, Horizontal Comparison articulates new forms of transoceanic solidarity.

The fields of comparative literature and Black Atlantic studies have an Africa problem: despite sustained attempts to decenter Western paradigms, they still privilege the United States and Europe as the primary loci of reference. So argues Cajetan Iheka in Horizontal Comparison, which aims to redirect both fields toward a non-hierarchical, South-South orientation focusing on the links between Africa and the Caribbean. 

By analyzing the literary work and real-life trajectories of writers such as Peter Abrahams, Chimamanda Adichie, Maryse Condé, Buchi Emecheta, Jamaica Kincaid, Claude McKay, Dinaw Mengestu, Ferdinand Oyono, Taiye Selasi, and Sam Selvon, Iheka draws our attention to the ways in which African and Caribbean texts inform and mutually constitute each other, bypassing the usual comparisons to Western literary canons. The book challenges not only Western cultural hegemony in the study of global Black writing, but also the very methodologies of comparative literary studies, offering fresh insights into reading, trauma, character, and the “worlding” of literature.

Cajetan Iheka is professor of English at Yale University, where he specializes in African and Caribbean literatures, ecocriticism, ecomedia, postcolonial literatures, and world literatures. He is author or editor of seven books, including Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature and African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics. He is also editor of Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media and coeditor of African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space and Intellectual Traditions of African Literature, 1960–2015.