Annual Zantop Memorial Lecture

Comparison as Accompaniment, Not Mourning
Haun Saussy, University of Chicago
Monday, April 14, 2025
05:30 PM - 06:30 PM Eastern Time (US & Canada)
Location: Moore Hall, Filene Auditorium
Sponsored by: Comparative Literature Program

We humanists might be a bit too invested in narratives of grief and mourning. It's time to raise our drooping heads and look around. Mourning is something done by and far for survivors, and when it's not too late to forestall the losses we would mourn, it's culpable neglect to fail to do something to rescue the lives or the goodness in lives, that become endangered.

Haun Saussy is University Professor at the University of Chicago, teaching in the department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and in the Committee on Social Thought. His work attempts to bring the lessons of anthropology and rhetoric to bear on several periods, languages, disciplines and cultures, establishing comparability as a path to mutual recognition beyond acknowledged differences. Among his books are The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (1994), Great Walls of Discourse (2001), Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader (2010), The Ethnography of Rhythm (2016), Translation as Citation: Zhuangzi Inside Out (2017), Are We Comparing Yet? (2019), The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature in Multilingual Asia (2022), Ru zhi he: Su Yuanxi zixuanji 如之何：蘇源熙自選集 (Comparatively Speaking: Selected Essays, 2023), and the edited collections Sinographies (2007) and Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (2008). As translator, he has produced versions of the Haitian poet Jean Métellus (When the Pipirite Sings, 2019) and the Italian dramatist Tino Caspanello (Bounds, 2020). His current project is a study of the medical NGO Partners In Health, present in eleven sites across the world, focusing on the effects that access to high-quality free healthcare has on impoverished communities.

Free and open to the public.