Affiliative Criticism

Pioneered as an approach to comparative literature in my first book, affiliative criticism is a methodological approach geared to engage head-on with twenty-first century political, ethical, and social concerns.

It involves an opening up of the relational imagination of literary criticism to networks of affiliation and response not beholden to what Édouard Glissant might call the ‘imperatives of filiation’, together with a sensitivity to literature’s capacity for sustaining acts of community-formation beyond what are imagined to be significant racial, linguistic, cultural, and temporal differences. Building on the work of Glissant, Edward W. Said, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Santiago Castro-Gómez, and Kojin Karatani, affiliative criticism provides a decolonial future for comparative criticism. For Robert Young, comparison has, historically, been marked by ‘the invocation of concepts drawn from European poetics or philosophy’, and situations in which ‘European theory operates as the node through which comparison is effected’. Affiliative criticism, in contrast, draws upon accounts of non-European epistemologies to show that comparison’s relations and translations can involve a more pronounced focus on the parallax or equivocation that results from ‘difference in relation to the connecting term’ (Viveiros de Castro).

Explored in detail in the introduction to Kojo Laing, Robert Browning and Affiliative Criticism (Palgrave, 2022), affiliative criticism promises to transform the ways in which certain texts are read and taught. Its pedagogical implications imply new possibilities for interdisciplinary education, and new opportunities for making all-too-familiar material strange and exciting, and for the development of methods capable of remaining in tune with the intellectual and analytical demands of the twenty-first century.