A forthcoming book argues comparative literature keeps returning to Europe and the United States as reference points and proposes a South–South model that reads African and Caribbean texts alongside one another to reconfigure how world literature is mapped.
Iheka identifies an “Africa problem” in comparative literature: Africa and the Caribbean are still often read through Western reference points.
Horizontal Comparison proposes a South–South approach that places African and Caribbean writings in lateral conversation rather than on a hierarchy centered on the West.
The book organizes five chapters around paired or grouped writers to explore themes such as the Black Atlantic, queerness and blackness, trauma, and character.
Across these pairings, Iheka examines how African and Caribbean texts have long been in conversation, informing and reshaping one another outside the familiar routes through Western literary canons. Iheka uses these African-Caribbean encounters to question the methods through which comparative literature itself has traditionally produced relationships between texts. The book's chapters move through questions of Black world literature, the Black Atlantic, reading, trauma, and character, asking how literature is "worlded" and who gets to determine what constitutes a literary world.
A Professor of English at Yale University, Iheka directs the Whitney Humanities Center and chairs the Council on African Studies. He is also editor-in-chief of African Studies Review, the flagship journal of the African Studies Association. Africa, the Caribbean, and the Making of Black World Literature will be published by the University of Chicago Press on November 9, 2026, in hardcover and paperback.
Horizontal Comparison proposes a different way of reading. Rather than arranging literary cultures along a hierarchy that places the West at the center, Iheka turns toward a South-South model, tracing the connections between African and Caribbean writing and asking what becomes visible when those traditions are placed in conversation with one another. The result is not simply another call to diversify the canon.
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