Why not compare? It's a janus-faced question, a double entendre, its dual meanings depending on emphasis. On the one hand, what are all the reasons why we should not compare? But, on the other hand, why shouldn't we compare, and what are the costs if we do not? Embedded in these questions are more fundamental ones ranging from the epistemological to the methodological. What do we mean by comparison, what effects do our comparisons have, and how do we actually do comparison? By “we” here, I address those involved in intellectual work who face choices on whether or not to engage in comparison; I do not, in this essay, address those who study how and why individuals or human societies compare and with what consequences.

Emigration is translation. Written by Leo Spitzer in 1934, “Learning Turkish” offers a glimpse into the historical circumstances of his and other German academics' exile in Istanbul—an exile that plays a foundational role in comparative literature, as Erich Auerbach, Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, and Emily Apter have argued. Spitzer's attempt to analyze the characteristics of the Turkish language while that language was transforming amplifies recent critical attempts to understand “modern Turkey's nation-based and state-directed poiesis” (Yaeger 11). Bridging the gap between exile in Istanbul and the modern Turkish language, “Learning Turkish” introduces complexity to contemporary paradigms of global comparatism and identifies symptoms of literary studies' relocation to the context of a new nation-state; the article exemplifies the complicity between local nationalisms and cultural imperialisms and illuminates, on a personal level, how linguistic estrangement becomes a way of negotiating the experience of deportation, of emigration, and of the foreignness of adoptive cultures for Spitzer.

Thwarted romances between Garrisoned American Soldiers and Young Filipinas, problems of translation in a multilingual contact zone, and the precarious masculine authority of the imperial agent irresistibly drawn to the mysterious women who surround him—these are the subjects of Frank R. Steward's short fiction about the American military occupation of the Philippines. But Steward's perspective as an African American military officer complicates efforts to interpret such familiar colonial scenarios. The stories' formal experimentation makes them a significant discovery in the archives of empire.

In 1955 the famous African American writer Richard Wright traveled to Southeast Asia to observe and report on the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. A watershed moment in the history of decolonization, the meeting, also known as the Bandung Conference, drew representatives from twenty-nine newly independent Asian and African countries, including the conference's sponsors: Burma, Ceylon, India, and Indonesia. At the conference's conclusion, as part of a “final communique,” participating countries issued their Declaration on the Promotion of World Peace and Cooperation, which advanced ten principles, ranging from “[r]espect for fundamental human rights” to “[r]ecognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations” to abstention from “serv[ing] the particular interests of any big powers” (Kahin 84). As an important precursor of the Nonaligned Movement, which was officially organized in 1961, the Bandung Conference set the stage for newly independent states to assert and strengthen their autonomy in a world often polarized by the United States and the Soviet Union.