Forum

Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black by R. A. Judy is a majestic work of comparative literary criticism both in its form and its content, moving across multiple languages and intellectual and creative traditions. Distinguished critics working in different fields were invited to reflect on the book’s imagination of another humanism and of a comparative common through the freedman Tom Windham’s words “We should have our liberty cause . . . us is human flesh” (xv). In exploring the concepts of being-in-flight, love-improper, and para-semiosis in the book, this forum’s essays by Fred Moten, Bedour Alagraa, Sora Han, and Jeffrey Sacks provide a valuable guide to this book’s conversation with writers, philosophers, and artists including Plato, al-Jāhiẓ, Ibn Khaldūn, W. E. B. Du Bois, Nabile Farès, and Hortense Spillers. Although Rei Terada, currently serving as the president of the American Comparative Literature Association, is not a contributor, her exchange with Judy in Futures of Comparative Literature (Routledge, 2017) might be read as an intertext of this forum. As Terada puts it: “Black studies’s pressure on the entire mesh of critical concepts is the most important movement in the profession [of comparative literature]” (89). This forum’s essays explore the possibility of a new comparatism as “translation in black,” inviting the necessary (un)translation of sentient flesh into “inscriptions of flesh” across world languages

Art · Comparative literature · Conversation · Flesh · Humanism · Linguistics · Literature · Sociology · Theology · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies