Decolonizing Comparative Literature

Reading Across Southeast Asian Literatures

By: Chi P. Pham (Editor), Jose Monfred C. Sy (Editor), Thi Nhu Trang Nguyen (Editor)

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eText | 23 November 2025

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This book promotes a novel and nuanced understanding of how the practices of comparative literature have engaged with the politics of nation-building in postcolonial Southeast Asia. It provides readings of Southeast Asian literatures in a comparative context, demonstrating how such readings enable texts to engage with issues connected to postcolonial nation-building across the region. Such issues include social exclusion, urbanization and environmental destruction, post-war traumas, animal narratives, migration, identity, gender, and literature, and politics. In doing so, this book moves beyond traditional comparative literature which is overwhelmingly rooted in Western literature and scholarship. To this end, it extends an invitation to decolonize comparative literature as a discipline. Few studies have attempted to examine the alternative non-western literary traditions that emerge from this specific Asian region, and so this book presents a rich combination of theoretical and critical studies that contribute to advancing the discipline of comparative literature in Southeast Asian geographies. It is relevant to scholars working in Asian literature, comparative literature, and in postcolonial frameworks in philosophy and cultural studies.