The work of Jewish Moroccan writer Edmond Amran El Maleh (1917–2010) explores the coextensive experience of Muslims and Jews in Morocco and the larger Arab-Mediterranean region, tracing a continuum of Judeo-Arab-Muslim affiliation. This notion of affiliation is reflected in a highly dynamic, fluid poetics, fed by a secular engagement with Jewish and Islamic mystical traditions and with a range of modernist and postcolonial writers. El Maleh found deep inspiration in Walter Benjamin's work on the ethical dimension of allegory as informed by kabbalistic notions of language. The chaotic profusion of events and images in El Maleh's third novel, Mille ans, un jour (“A Thousand Years, One Day”) reflects Benjamin's “Kabbalistic shard” and his valorization of the “scraps of history.” This discursive mode challenges the totalizing narratives and racialized binaries undergirding forms of violence that El Maleh identifies in colonialism and fascism, as well as in contemporary Zionism. His work thus aims to dissolve the false oppositional binary through which the identities of Jew and Arab have come to be understood.

Disability studies scholars and Renaissance scholars have much to learn from early modern schemata of disability. Early modern people used nature and the natural to discriminate against and to include people with atypical bodies and minds. In his writings, the English physician John Bulwer (1606–56) considers Deafness a natural human variation with definite advantages, anticipating current concepts of biolinguistic diversity and Deaf-gain, while acknowledging his society's biases. He refutes the exclusion of sign language and other forms of what he calls “ocular audition” from natural law, which made capacity for speech the benchmark for natural rights. Instead of using Deaf people as exceptions that prove the rule of nature or as limit cases for humanity, Bulwer makes deafness part of a plastic understanding of the senses, and he promotes the sociability of signed languages as a conduit to a universal language that might be encouraged and taught in England.

Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama promotes a form of reparation for its author and its readers, making a case for the much-maligned idea that literature serves therapeutic aims. The book not only models a reparative reading practice by using comics form to engage the insights and limits of psychoanalysis and modernist literature but also elicits a reparative reading experience for a community of readers forged in the discovery of a common emotional struggle. Bechdel's memoir represents an autobiographical narrator's loving yet ambivalent relationship with her mother in ways that invite readers to acknowledge a shared affective history of complex mother-daughter relationships that merits public examination, empathy, and social inclusion.

The aesthetic practices in Max Frisch's late story Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (Man in the Holocene [1979]) lend themselves to a reflection on the current global environmental crisis and its anthropological and epistemological repercussions. Frisch's visual and narrative artwork anticipates central issues in the current Anthropocene debate, in which the humanities have made incisive interventions. I bring these interventions to bear on close readings of Frisch's intermedia aesthetics, unearthing an environmental reflexivity that revolves around issues of time and history, place and identity, nature and human knowledge, metamorphosis and anthropogenic transformation. I thus invite us to reconsider in the light of the anthropological and sociopolitical imaginaries of the Anthropocene some ways in which the literature of the past half century has negotiated the relation between human beings and their natural environments.

In a queer-theory reading of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol in the 2004 polemic No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman relied on a narrow concept of reproduction as procreative heteronormativity anchored in heterosexual sex. He left untold the other story of reproduction: our daily reproduction in the service of capitalism. Marxist and materialist feminist theories of reproduction remind us that we all engage in reproductive work and that women have traditionally been considered natural providers of this work. A reading of J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man, in which a male protagonist depends on the domestic labor of a migrant woman, provides a counterpoint to No Future.

In 1935 the Dutch scholar Johannes B. Tielrooy argued that Arthur Rimbaud's prose poem “Mystique” (c. 1872) was an ekphrasis, or literary description, of the central panel of Hubert and Jan van Eyck's altarpiece Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (1432). Although this hypothesis was deemed credible for a number of years, it is now thought to be unlikely that the painting inspired the poem or that the poem is an instance of ekphrasis. However, Tielrooy's ekphrastic interpretation can still be used to reveal elements of the poem otherwise hidden to the reader. I demonstrate the potential of Tielrooy's speculative practice, what I call mystical ekphrasis, by juxtaposing Rimbaud's poem with a chromolithographic representation of one of Jean Fouquet's illuminations, with which the poem also has possible but not conclusive links.

Marilynne Robinson, the author of Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, and Lila, has garnered attention for her sustained engagement with religious themes. Yet for all its robust participation in the theology of a distinctively Calvinist Protestantism, Robinson's fiction is invested in religious forms that are less propositional than phenomenological. It imagines belief as both a perceptual background and a system of thought that activates concentrated aesthetic attention to quotidian moments of temporal contingency and worldly ephemerality. Consequently, Robinson's work intervenes in the burgeoning critical discourse surrounding religion and literature, offering an alternative to methodologies that prioritize the ontology of belief over the aesthetic modes of perception that belief makes available.

Those of us working in the american academy have so internalized the grammar of postcolonial theory that we now take for granted interstices, hybridity, slippage, and liminality, among other terms commonplace in the discourse of postcolonialism. Beyond the terms themselves, we have taken to heart, absorbed, and extended the lessons from Homi K. Bhabha's The Location of Culture. Those lessons furnished a stimulative template for analyzing particular power asymmetries. Nevertheless, scholars have not referred as widely as we might expect to Bhabha's work in general and The Location of Culture in particular, especially in some fields for which postcolonial theory was supposed to be a natural fit, such as African literary studies. The index of African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, a 764-page compendium assembling many of the most important interventions in African literature from the 1970s to the early twenty-first century, is an instructive example: it lists only three entries for Bhabha (Olaniyan and Quayson). Given that postcolonial theory and African literary studies share an interest and a language (the aftermath of British colonialism and English) in their research agendas, we might also ponder the frequency with which postcolonial theory in the vein of Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Edward Said has elicited critique from scholars working with African literary texts and in African studies writ large. Individual persuasion is at work in these critiques but so also undoubtedly are positionality and location. We should read the critiques, then, not for their universal resonance, but for an understanding of debates unfolding in specific locations around the world, as well as in relation to the subject positions of individual scholars and their ideological proclivities.

The ensuing remarks on Homi Bhabha's collection of essays The Location of Culture are framed by the following questions: Under what discursive conditions does a text arrive? How do conditions beyond the text determine its reception and circulation? And why is Bhabha routinely associated more with ambivalence, interstice, and liminality than with the ways in which they illuminate problems of race, the archive, history, or the affective bodily subject of history? To focus these ruminations, I will discuss the intervention, impact, and afterlife of The Location of Culture through the concept of hybridity, arguably one of the greatest hits of postcolonial studies and one closely associated with the work of Bhabha. Informed by Mikhail Bakhtin's propositions about hybridity in linguistic utterance; by Sigmund Freud's theories of ambivalence; by Walter Benjamin's discussions of history, event, and language; by Jacques Lacan's discourses on ego, language, and subjectivity; by Michel Foucault's investigations of history, knowledge, and power; and by Jacques Derrida's theories of différance, Bhabha's formulations have gained currency well beyond the humanities. Appropriations of hybridity in globalization discourse, however, often do not honor Bhabha's poststructural politics or its rooting in a complex history of ideas even as the critics of hybridity fail to recognize its inception in archival moments and particular enunciative contexts. Bhabha's work not only poses questions to history in a mode characteristic of deconstruction, it also commences in history in a clearly postcolonial modality. I want to review missed appointments with pressing questions of history and race in the global reception of Bhabha's concept of hybridity, an approach that constitutes an implicit plea for the recognition and reanimation of these questions in contemporary uses of the term hybridity in the discourse of globalization.

At the MLA'S annual convention in 2015, a roundtable i had organized, remembering The Location of Culture: circulations, Interventions, and Futurity, gathered scholars from across literary periods and fields to reflect on the legacies of Homi Bhabha's seminal work. As new disciplinary shifts in literary studies witness the reinvention of postcolonial literatures as global anglophone literatures, one of the questions that roundtable asked was, Whither postcoloniality? Returning to The Location of Culture—one of the most influential texts in the fields of postcolonial studies and critical theory—can perhaps illuminate how postcolonial critique resonates anew for the literature of our world after empire.

I've had Nina Simone's “sinnerman” on repeat for months. The propulsive force of Simone's 1965 live version of this gospel song drives its ten-minute ferocity straight into the contemporary American zeitgeist. As she tells her audience in the lead-up to a lesser-known performance of the song, recorded in 1961, Simone learned “Sinnerman” when she was a “little bitty girl in revival meetings. It happened when my mother and lots more like her tried to save souls.” The song's judgment-day tale of redemption's refusal is told doubly, both by the sinner—“I cried rock / don't you see I need you, rock”—and by those from whom the sinner begs, if not forgiveness, then simply some measure of mercy from the divine justice to come: “Oh sinnerman, where you gonna run to?” The break in the middle of the 1965 recording strips the song down to Simone's handclaps on the second and fourth beats. All that remains is the tenuous intensity of the time neither of redemption nor of damnation but merely of “accompaniment” in the in-between (Tomlinson and Lipsitz). Called forth from that time, in all of Simone's live recordings, and missing from those of Les Baxter or the Weavers just a few years earlier, comes the insurgent cry for “Power!” over and over, to the point of near exhaustion.

In the wake of 9/11, from an already distant moment of globalization (before we even knew words like anthropocene or Facebook), Arif Dirlik asked if postcolonial critique hadn't failed to take the rapidly evolving new modalities of capitalism into account. By foregrounding the experience of colonialism so insistently, postcolonialism risked cultivating “an exaggerated view of the hold of the past over contemporary realities, and an obliviousness to the reconfiguration of past legacies by contemporary restructurations of power” (“Rethinking Colonialism” 429). What it had achieved, however, was an interrogation of “fundamental contradictions in an earlier discourse on colonialism,” whereby the meaning of colonialism had shifted from the post-1945 Manichaean narrative to something far more ambiguous (431). As a consequence, even anticolonial nationalism, which had largely been shaped by native functionaries of colonial rule, came to be understood as a product of colonialism. Frantz Fanon was among the first to confront this problem (119–99). But when his alternative vision of an organic nationhood developing out of the rural peasantry failed to emerge, the intellectual legacies of anticolonialism were, unsurprisingly, subjected to sustained interrogation. Indeed, Dirlik attributes such a reorientation in post-colonial criticism precisely to the failures of postcolonial regimes (“Rethinking Colonialism” 434).

In the past twenty-five years, no theoretical conception has summed up the complexity of the colonial experience, and the possibilities of its interpretation, as well as Homi K. Bhabha's “hybridity.” “he sign of the productivity of colonial power,” but also the “name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal,” hybridity exposes the uncomfortable state in which colonial culture settled and expanded and, today, continues to beleaguer the state of being “postcolonial” (Bhabha 112). Signiied by the “discovery of the book,” hegemony was marked by the miracle of an object that was at once authoritative and unknowable, one that the supposedly unlettered native could hold in reverent hands (102). In the dark space of the native's hands and narrated within a native register, however, the “colonial text emerges uncertainly” (107). he intent to civilize and anglicize a body of social, religious, and aesthetic practices in the colony, then, is adulterated, perhaps even unconsciously resisted, once it is disseminated by way of the seemingly irrefutable book.

According to Isaac Julien, the director of Black Skin, White Mask, a film imagining the life of Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha is presented in a nonspeaking role as a colored, racialized “colonial subject” to lend “texture” to the cinematography (Interview). Unlike the eloquent postcolonial critics Stuart Hall and Françoise Vergès, who are interviewed extensively in the ilm, the mute Bhabha is a cipher, a visual trace of diference in the philosophical, cinematic, and audio montage that composes Julien's meditation on decolonization (Frantz Fanon [Director's cut]). In many ways, Julien's Fanon seems indebted to Bhabha's strong reading, against the grain of Fanon's oeuvre, in “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition,” a foreword Bhabha wrote for a new British edition of Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1986. Julien's Fanon is an interstitial igure, stitched together through multiple viewpoints and physically composed of cinematic elements juxtaposed in striking contrast to one another. He emerges from scraps of discourse cast of and reassembled, much as Bhabha's Fanon is captured in Fanon's ungrammatical utterance that betrays by ellipsis the nature of identity, which is that identity is “not”: “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man” (113). The revelation that the nature of identity is spatially split and temporally deferred-the deinition of Derridean diférance-is most truly represented in the colonial situation, where white mythologies of wholeness and authenticity are actualized as performances of power. When these mythologies are accompanied by paranoid fantasies of blackness that reveal the contradictory duplicity of white representations of the other-the simian Negro, the inscrutable Chinaman-this racial discrimination and its neurotic imagery reveal the nature of the white self and its pretense of universality: that the human is not whole and that the Enlightenment dream of self-presence is an illusion thrown up by the anxious exercise of mastery over those lesser humans, the Negroes.

The title The Location of Culture suggests that the book's author, Homi K. Bhabha, places an overriding importance on a culture's spatial and geographic situation. Lest Bhabha's readers get too fixated on culture's site and locality, however, the title's emphasis on place is soon qualified by an epigraph from the book's most-cited author, Frantz Fanon, that emphasizes temporality: “The architecture of this work is rooted in the temporal. Every human problem must be considered from the standpoint of time” (qtd. in Bhabha xiv). So, while culture must be located, the architecture of The Location of Culture is rooted in the temporal. The place and time of its moments of production are affirmed throughout its essays with a wealth of contemporary references and opening comments like “In Britain, in the 1980s …” (27). No book of theory is more self-consciously embedded in its own space and time. The Location of Culture, published in 1994, is a very English book, written from within the political, cultural, and intellectual world of the London of the 1980s and early 1990s, in which migrant activists from the Caribbean and South Asia such as Bhabha, Salman Rushdie, and Stuart Hall were challenging the verities of a long-established, socialist, masculinist, English intellectual and political culture. The brilliant innovation of The Location of Culture was to create a new language, a new articulation and understanding of minority positions—which is why the response to it has been so overwhelming, from academics, artists, and many others. The work that went into The Location of Culture was intimately related to Bhabha's own milieu and time: the book is the product of his decennium mirabile in London.

Much has been written about Stein's politics ever since it was revealed, in 1996, that Stein had translated many of Philippe Pétain's speeches (Burns and Dydo, “Gertrude Stein”; Van Dusen). If some critics accuse Stein of collaboration with Vichy France, others defend her by pointing out contradictory evidence regarding her behavior during the war years. Barbara Will, in Unlikely Collaboration; Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay, and the Vichy Dilemma (2011), casts Stein in the role of pro-Vichy thinker whose support of Pétain was “heartfelt and dogged” (118). In addition to translating Pétain's speeches, Stein was a close friend of Bernard Fay, who, as head of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, was an official high up in the administration of Vichy France. Charles Bernstein, Edward Burns, and Joan Retallack take up Stein's defense in jacket2's online dossier Gertrude Stein's War Years; Setting the Record Straight (2012). They argue that no conclusive evidence ties Stein explicitly to Vichy France (Burns) and highlight the irony in some of her statements—for instance, that Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace Prize (Bernstein, “Gertrude Stein”; Retallack). Furthermore, Stein published her writing in both the Vichy-sponsored magazine Patrie (“Fatherland”) and the anti-Nazi and anti-Vichy journals Confluences, Fontaine (“Fountain”), and L'arbalète (“The Cross-Bow”) during the war years (Burns and Dydo, “Three Lives”; Burns). She sympathizes with the French maquis in her postwar memoir Wars I Have Seen and writes about the inner workings of the Resistance in her play In Savoy; or, Yes Is for a Very Young Man (Wagner-Martin).