As i thought about the subject of this panel, “the future of the humanities in a fragmented world,” the implications of each word proved elusive. What does “future” mean? What aspect of the humanities? When was the world not “fragmented”? Is that a bad or a good thing? And “world,” of course, could reference anything from planet to Disney (between the two of which there may turn out to be no distinction).

Are we in a posthumanist world? who knows? clever thinkers from Nietzsche and Henry Adams to Foucault and Lyotard have been giving us this message. And if we are in such a world, how can there be a place for the humanities in it? Plodding along behind those brilliant minds, I shall try to puzzle out the situation of the humanities at a practical or pedagogical level, by looking at what some humanists have been saying about the humanities recently and then considering briefly the history of humanism and humanistic education. After that, I shall make some modest proposals about what is to be done.

As a way of restaging certain questions about postmodernity (is it marked by rupture or repetition, or is it all illusory?), this essay imagines Fredric Jameson's iconic disorientation at the Bonaventure Hotel as a reenactment of Dante's crisis in the selva oscura. That imaginative act allows one to see how a nonmodern measure makes postmodernism visible (the concept of “cognitive mapping,” for instance, derives from Kevin Lynch's appreciation of the urban fabric of Florence). And it allows one to perceive how Jameson's response to our contemporary condition assumes a Dantean cast, becoming an incorporative act of totalizing, manifest stylistically and conceptually, that deploys allegory to trans-code phenomena into the terms of the dominant system. To what degree does the internalization of such a hermeneutic enterprise (a medieval Christian legacy) render religion as such imperceptible, compelling us to perceive acts committed in the name of Islam as merely a displacement of (proper) politics?

Thomas Harriot's A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia has emerged as a paradigmatic “contact” text, in large part thanks to Stephen Greenblatt's canonical interpretation in “Invisible Bullets.” The pair of texts is examined in terms of an implicit codification of the disciplinary tensions between anthropology and history. An alternative reading of an Algonkian ethnography of the English suggests new ways of revisiting the disciplinary rift in colonial studies.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was one of the foremost texts of the American abolitionist movement, but its impact on politics was international. This article traces the reception of Stowe's novel in Spain, the last European empire with a slave economy, during the mid–nineteenth century. As an imperial power, Spain was the political and economic force behind the transatlantic slave trade; but as a nation of readers, it imported a narrative back across the Atlantic in order to fictionalize and contemplate the effects of its slave policies in the Caribbean. One such adaptation converted the novel into a play about a slave trader and recast Stowe's story of slavery in the Atlantic world in terms of Spain's role in the slave trade and in the imperial control of Cuba.

This paper examines the ways in which the idea of renaissance was understood and appropriated by Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century. My discussion foregrounds Hu Shi, one of the most important intellectual leaders in modern China and the main architect of the Chinese vernacular movement. I analyze his rewriting and reinvention of the European Renaissance as well as his declaration and presentation of the Chinese Renaissance in various contexts. Hu's creative uses of the Italian Renaissance and passionate claims for a Chinese Renaissance reveal the performative magic of the word renaissance and prompt us to ask what a renaissance is. The Chinese Renaissance and the fact that various non-European countries have declared and promoted their own renaissances invite a scholarly reconsideration of “renaissance” as a trans-cultural phenomenon rather than as a critical category originated and therefore owned by a certain culture.

This article underscores the need to reconstruct Mexican American literary historiography by locating and analyzing pre–Chicano/a movement critical sources. Consideration of how Mexican Americans saw their literature at different junctures in the past will ensure that we do not impose our own aesthetic and political criteria as we reinterpret older texts. I analyze a 1959 literary history of New Mexico and Colorado in order to explore how a recovery of this particular text would intervene in current debates in the field of Chicana/o studies, most prominently the tension between nationalism and regional studies, on the one hand, and transnationalism, on the other. My analysis demonstrates that Mexican Americans and Chicanos/as have shared literary tastes and cultural capital with other Latinas/os and Latin Americans and that consequently Chicano/a literary history should be a discipline that goes beyond borders.

This essay examines Chester Himes's transformation, in 1957, from a writer of African American social protest fiction into a “French” writer of Harlem crime thrillers. Instead of representing the exhaustion of his political commitment, Himes's transformation from a “serious” writer of didactic fiction into an exiled crime novelist represents a radical change in political and literary tactics. In dialogue with the editor and former surrealist Marcel Duhamel, Himes's crime fiction, beginning with La reine des pommes (now A Rage in Harlem), invents a darkly comic fictional universe that shares an affinity with the surrealist notion of black humor in its vehement denial of epistemological and ethical certainty. Rejecting the efforts of Richard Wright and the existentialists to adopt an engaged form of political writing, Himes's crime fiction instead forges a kind of vernacular surrealism, one independent of the surrealist movement but nevertheless sharing surrealism's insistence on the volatility of written and political expression.

The phenomenon of “embedded reporting” seemed to emerge with the invasion of iraq in march 2003. it is defined as the situation in which journalists agree to report only from the perspective established by military and governmental authorities. They traveled only on certain trucks, looked only at certain scenes, and relayed home only images and narratives of certain kinds of action. Embedded reporting implies that this mandated perspective would not itself become the topic of reporters who were offered access to the war on the condition that their gaze remained restricted to the established parameters of designated action. I want to suggest that embedded reporting has taken place in less explicit ways as well: one example is the agreement of the media not to show pictures of the war dead, our own or their own, on the grounds that that would be anti-American. Journalists and newspapers were denounced for showing coffins of the American war dead shrouded in flags. Such images should not be seen because they might arouse certain kinds of sentiments; the mandating of what could be seen—a concern with regulating content—was supplemented by control over the perspective from which the action and destruction of war could be seen. Another implicit occurrence of embedded reporting is in the Abu Ghraib photographs. The camera angle, the frame, the posed subjects all suggest that those who took the photographs were actively involved in the perspective of the war, elaborating that perspective and even giving it further validity.

“Were i a writer, and dead.” that phrase from the preface to roland barthes's 1971 sade fourier loyola embodies a slightly perverse expression of posthumous longing from the critic who composed “The Death of the Author” a few years earlier. Barthes goes on to say how much he would like it if “through the efforts of some friendly and detached biographer,” his life were “to reduce itself to a few details,” to, since he loved neologisms, a handful of “biographemes” (9). These biographical details of taste and tone would somehow transport the writer into space, scatter, touch another body—that body too would be destined to dispersal. The result would be not a whole life but a life full of holes, the way Marcel Proust, Barthes thought, wrote his.

“Your corrections are biting, maternal, just. Your example is luminous.” These words float on the page in susan sontag's last novel, In America, near the end of the book (349). The reader isn't surprised by the indirection of the address, the fused “you” of the narrator's voice looped through the character's. Sontag has been present from the first pages, in which she finds herself traveling through time to nineteenth-century Poland, into a drawing room at a party. She moves about pleasantly dislocated, examining her statuesque characters caught in a tableau vivant as she is about to set them free. They will be freer than Sontag's four grandparents likely were when coming from Poland to America, yet this small group of fictional friends will be swept up in the centripetal power of a charismatic personality with exceptional talent, the historical actress Maryna Z. Now, as the novel is about to close, Maryna is poised to be the inspiring, compelling director of her own small repertory company in America. We have come to trust her completely. The praise for her efforts, those words about correction and example, comes from somewhere over the stage lights out of the depths of some metaphysical, darkened theater but also from inner admonishment and fair-minded assessment. This is how she must be, our Sontag-Maryna; this is what art requires, this is what is needed.

After her death, susan sontag was portrayed in many obituaries (including one i wrote for the french daily Le Monde) as an intellectual who had moved from the formalism and aestheticism of her early work to the ethically engaged stance of her later essays, right up to the last one she published in her lifetime, the stinging indictment of American torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Sontag was eloquent, as well as somewhat despairing, in her diagnosis of an “increasing acceptance of brutality” and a “culture of shamelessness” in American life (“Regarding the Torture” 28–29); similarly, after September 11, 2001, she did not hesitate to denounce (in a brief essay that earned her the label of “un-American” in some quarters) the “sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators” in the days following the attack (“Comment”).

When James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wen-Dell Holmes, and two hundred other prominent American Literary and intellectual figures joined efforts to bring Amelia Edwards to the United States for a public lecture tour in 1889-90, they were acknowledging her importance as a writer and educator. The author of novels, short stories, popular histories, and works of travel literature, Edwards had established a second career as an advocate for the new science of Egyptology. As cofounder of and secretary for the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) in 1882, Edwards wrote extensively for the Morning Post and the Academy in England and Harper's in the United States. By 1887, she had established a strong working relationship with William Copley Winslow of the Boston Museum and received honorary degrees from Smith College and Columbia College for her literary and scholarly achievements. By the time of her tour, Edwards had succeeded in fostering a new understanding of a culture more ancient and exotic than those of Greece and Rome. Audiences for her lectures in both England and America were thus prepared for her to illuminate the Egyptian past, but listeners to this lecture on the social and political position of women in ancient Egypt may have been somewhat startled to find shadows from that past cast on their own present.