This article revisits the idea of relational comparison that grew out of my earlier research in post-apartheid South Africa in order to put it to work in new ways. First I clarify distinctively different modalities of ‘comparison’ and their political stakes, and go on to specify how the ‘relational’ in relational comparison refers to an open, non-teleological conception of dialectics at the core of Marx’s method. I then engage with sharply polarized urban studies and subaltern studies debates cast in terms of Marxism vs. postcolonialism/poststructuralism and suggest how distinctions among comparative modalities help to reconfigure the terms of the debates. The article lays the groundwork for a larger project that focuses on understanding resurgent nationalisms, populisms, and racisms in different regions of the world in relation to one another in the era of neoliberal forms of capitalism. More broadly I suggest how relational comparison, extended to include conjunctural analysis, can be used as a method for practicing Marxist postcolonial geographies.
AndersonB (2006 [1983]) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
2.
AndersonKB (2010) Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
3.
BhaskarR (1993) Dialectics. London: Verso.
4.
BlautJM (1993) The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York: The Guilford Press.
5.
BrennerNSchmidC (2014) The ‘urban age’ in question. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research38(3): 731–55.
6.
BrennerNSchmidC (2015) Towards a new epistemology of the urban?City19(2–3): 151–182.
7.
BuckleyMStraussK (2016) With, against, and beyond Lefebvre: Planetary urbanism and epistemic plurality. Environment and Planning D. DOI: 10.1177/0263775816628872.
8.
ChakrabartyD (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
9.
ChariS (2015) Three moments of Stuart Hall in South Africa. Critical Sociology, early online publication 0896920515620475.
10.
ChibberV (2013) Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso.
GidwaniV (2008) Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
20.
GilmoreRW (2007) Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
21.
GlissantE (1997) Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
22.
GoswamiM (2002) Rethinking the modular nation form: Toward a sociohistorical conception of nationalism. Comparative Studies in Society and History44(4): 770–799.
23.
GoswamiM (2004) Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
24.
HallS (1980) Race, articulation, and societies structured in dominance. In: Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism. Paris: UNESCO, 305–345.
25.
HallS (1985) Signification, representation, ideology: Althusser and the post-structuralist debates. Critical Studies in Mass Communication2(2): 91–114.
26.
HallS (1986) The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees. Journal of Communication Inquiry10(2): 28–44.
27.
HallS (2003) Marx’s notes on method: A ‘reading’ of the ‘1857 Introduction’. Cultural Studies17(2): 113–149.
28.
HarootunianH (2005) Some thoughts on comparability and the space-time problem. Boundary 232(2): 23–52.
29.
HarootunianH (2015) Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
30.
HartG (2002) Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
31.
HartG (2006) Denaturalizing dispossession: Critical ethnography in the age of resurgent imperialism. Antipode38(5): 977–1004.
32.
HartG (2007) Changing concepts of articulation: Political stakes in South Africa today. Review of African Political Economy34(111): 85–101.
33.
HartG (2014) Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
34.
HartG (2015) Political society and its discontents: Translating passive revolution in India and South Africa today. Economic and Political Weekly50(43): 43–51.
35.
HarveyD (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
36.
HofmeyerIWilliamsM (eds) (2011) South Africa and India: Shaping the Global South. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
37.
JamesCLR (1989 [1938]) The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (2nd ed., rev). New York: Vintage Books.
38.
KaiwarV (2015) The Postcolonial Orient: The Politics of Difference and the Project of Provincializing Europe. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
39.
KatzC (2008) Messing with ‘the project’. In: HarveyD, A Critical Reader, ed. CastreeNGregoryD.Malden, MA: Blackwell, 234–246.
40.
KipferSGoonewardenaK (2013) Urban Marxism and the post-colonial question: Henri Lefebvre and ‘colonisation’. Historical Materialism21(2): 76–116.
41.
KipferSHartG (2013) Translating Gramsci in the current conjuncture. In: EkersMHartGKipferSLoftusA (eds) Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 323–343.
42.
KoivistoJLahtinenM (2012) Historical-critical dictionary of Marxism: ‘Conjuncture’. Historical Materialism20(1): 267–277.
43.
KosikK (1976) Dialectics of the Concrete. Boston, MA: D. Reidel.
44.
LaveJ (2011) Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
45.
LefebvreH (1991 [1974]) The Production of Space. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
46.
LefebvreH (2003) The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
47.
LeitnerHSheppardE (2016) Provincializing critical urban theory: Extending the ecosystem of possibilities. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research40(1): 228–235.
MasseyD (1994) Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
50.
McMichaelP (1990) Incorporating comparison within a world-historical perspective: An alternative comparative method. American Historical Review55(3): 385–397.
51.
MerrifieldA (2012) The urban question under planetary urbanization. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research37: 909–922.
52.
MerrifieldA (2013) The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
53.
NashA (2009) The Dialectical Tradition on South Africa. London: Routledge.
54.
OllmanB (1971) Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
55.
OllmanB (2003) Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
RobinsonC (2000 [1983]) Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
58.
RobinsonJ (2016a) Thinking cities through elsewhere: Comparative tactics for a more global urban studies. Progress in Human Geography40(1): 3–29.
59.
RobinsonJ (2016b) Comparative urbanism: New geographies and cultures of theorizing the urban. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research40(1): 187–199.
60.
RossK (2015) Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. London: Verso.
61.
RoyA (2015) What is urban about critical urban theory?Urban Geography37(6): 810–823.
62.
RoyA (2016) Who’s afraid of postcolonial theory?International Journal of Urban and Regional Research40(1): 200–209.
63.
SarkarS (2006) Inclusive democracy and its enemies. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies7(3): 304–309.
64.
SayerD (1987) The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
65.
SayreN (2008) Assessing the effects of the Grundrisse in Anglophone geography and anthropology. Antipode40(5): 898–920.
66.
ScottAJStorperM (2015) The nature of cities: The scope and limits of urban theory. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research39(1): 1–16.
67.
Sekyi-OtuA (1996) Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
68.
ShaninT (1983) Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press.
69.
SheppardE (2008a) David Harvey and dialectical space-time. In: HarveyD, A Critical Reader, ed. CastreeNGregoryD.Malden, MA: Blackwell, 121–141.
70.
SheppardE (2008b) Geographic dialectics?Environment and Planning A40: 2603–2612.
71.
ShihS-M (2013) Comparison as relation. In: FelskiRFriedmanSS (eds) Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 80–98.
72.
SparkeM (2005) In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-State. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
73.
StanekŁ (2011) Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
74.
TillyC (1984) Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
75.
WallersteinE (1983) The Capitalist World Economy. New York: Cambridge University Press.
76.
WrightM (2008) Differences that matter. In: HarveyD, A Critical Reader, ed. CastreeNGregoryD.Malden, MA: Blackwell, 80–101.
