The challenging task of the comparatist is to select texts for analysis that shed more light on literature or the human condition when discussed together than either would if considered in isolation. To be both interesting and instructive, comparative analyses must provide sufficient historical context about each object of study so that its contribution to the overall argument is balanced across difference. Having set such dynamics in motion, the comparatist should get out of the way and let a dialog develop between the ideas contained in each primary source. When comparisons go wrong, it is often due to a lack of sufficient intellectual connective tissue linking one topic to the next. While Jaime Hanneken's Imagining the Postcolonial: Discipline, Poetics, Practice in Latin American and Francophone Discourse contains several provocative and insightful readings and insights about individual texts, it never quite to meets the promises implied in its title.
Hanneken's book...
