Uzoma Esonwanne, University of Toronto

July 15, 2010

Professor David Naylor
President
University of Toronto
27 King’s College Circle, Room 206
Toronto ON M5S 1A1



Dear Professor Naylor,

Permit me to add my voice to the flood of voices raised in dismay at the proposed disestablishment of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. As a specialist in African literature and postcolonial theory, I have been very pleased to be cross–appointed at the Centre. However, when in its Plan 2009–2014 the Centre declared its intention to open our program up to “scholarly and cultural conversations” being conducted in languages around the world, including First Nations languages, I was further delighted. Comparativity at Toronto, I thought, has now chosen to keep a tryst with World Literature.

So you can imagine my consternation at learning that, by successfully proselytizing “theory” to national language literature departments, Comparative Literature has exhausted its intellectual mandate and rendered itself academically redundant. May I point out that “theory” in Comparative Literature has never been just about itself? Because language, representation, and the human (and, sometimes, the subhuman and inhuman), the substance that “theory” grapples with, are dynamic, and because that dynamism is inherent in the literary “conversations” to which Plan 2009–2014 refers, to dissolve the Centre now would be to signal to all that we do not wish our faculty and students to participate. Could we seriously claim that students and faculty working in a diminished collaborative program would be able to meet the challenges of comparativity in the 21st century? If we must “work across” the languages of literature in order to study phenomena transnationally in their global dimension, then preserving the Centre for Comparative Literature would serve us best.


I understand that to “preserve the quality of education” in the Faculty of Arts and Science, as Dean Meric Gertler rightly argues, we must exercise fiscal prudence. That is why I would not suggest that Comparative Literature should not share the burden of dealing with the Faculty’s $60-million deficit. Rather, what I urge is that the University avoid goring its cows, sacred and profane, in the name of fiscal prudence. If I may speak for Comparative Literature and similar metaphorical bovines, I suspect that given the chance they, like humans, would happily go on a strict diet for a while than die.


Yours sincerely,


Uzoma Esonwanne
Associate Professor
Department of English & Centre for Comparative Literature
Associate Director
MA English Program


cc Professor Cheryl Misak (Provost), Professor Meric Gertler (Dean, Faculty of Arts & Science), and Professor Neil ten Kortenaar (Director, Centre for Comparative Literature)