Description: This is a historical and critical reassessment of the field of comparative literature--the study of cultures and their literary posterity across national borders and historical frontiers--at a moment when notions of literacy and culture are under inordinate pressure by predatory globalization and militaristic realpolitik.
Review Quotes: "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"