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Abstract
This work seeks to examine the ethical underpinnings of the study of literatures and cultures located otherwise than a Euro-American context, especially in a context of hermeneutic lenses located and defined in the Euro-American Academy. It contextualizes a study of literatures – Comparative Literature as such a discipline or field specifically, within larger questions and debates concurrent within a practice of humanism in the global academy. Using the literary cultures and contexts of Africa, South Asia and their respective diasporas as counterpoints, this work seeks to examine the problems of dialogues between the Global Souths, especially from a location within Western Euro-American epistemologies. With a specific focus on an idea of a “crisis” in academic practices of humanism globally, the analyses and arguments presented here seek to examine the experiential specificities of such crises in locations such as India. Such an exploration into the political exigencies underlying any locational practice of academic humanism, emphasizes the resonances between local and global concerns in the humanities and the forces that increasingly define questions of subjecthood, agency and dignity within the larger human condition today. It is from such an understanding of the relationship between the human condition and practices in academic humanism that this work moves towards pondering relationality in general, and specifically the conditions, preconditions, and postconditions of relationships between the Self and the Other. Through such considerations, this work further seeks to imagine and posit possible ethical frameworks for encounters and engagements with alterities beyond limiting identitarian frames, in a context of intercultural and transnational literary and cultural research.