Memos from the Besieged City

Djelal Kadir is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University and founding president of the International American Studies Association. His books include Columbus and the Ends of the Earth (1992) and The Other Writing (1993)

"Djelal Kadir ranges with remarkable confidence and sureness of step across several continents and several centuries, offering a bracing challenge to Comparative Literature to rethink its history, its politics, and its future. Exceptionally original in conception, innovative in argumentation, and eloquent in style,Memos from the Besieged City takes on a moral urgency in addressing itself to an age of homeland insecurity and projections of power abroad, revealing an all too close linkage between American comparatism and a hegemonic hubris that academics may share even as they seek to oppose it."—David Damrosch, Harvard University "This important and original book will prove controversial and difficult to ignore. Kadir deals with apparently timeless issues while discussing, often pointedly and trenchantly, issues of cultural politics that are as immediate as the running trailers on the bottom of the cable news channels. He holds a multi-leveled conversation, addressing both specialists in the field and those same specialists in their embodiment of citizenship. This dual thrust constitutes the book's most important accomplishment and demonstrates the urgent necessity for the Comparative Literature he advocates."—Wlad Godzich, University of California, Santa Cruz