Once Were People Without Writing. This is the Dominant Narrative of Pacific Literature. Such a View Rarely Takes the Lack of a recognizable alphabet or script in most of the inhabited islands of the Pacific at the time of contact with Europeans as a neutral difference. Lack is deficiency. Curiously, both detractors from and celebrants of Pacific literature agree that Pacific societies and cultures were introduced to writing by Europeans. The detractors see this originary lack as a permanent impediment to the development of worthy literature. (Few ever say, They lacked a written script, and they haven't produced any literature of note—it must be because they have a superior civilization.) The celebrants see the lack as a difference to be treasured along with the eventual acquisition of writing. So how can we better understand Pacific literature: where it came from and where it could take its readers?

The Recent Death of AIMÉ Césaire has Been an Occasion for Extolling his Virtues As Venerable Patriarch, Founding Father, and sovereign artist. Even his fiercest critics have considered him a unique poet-politician worthy of being interred in the Pantheon by the French state. Members of the créolité movement, such as Raphael Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau, hailed him as the “nègre fondamental” ‘foundational black man,’ who was also like the father of the Martinican people. Confiant reiterated his filial devotion as Césaire's “fils à jamais” ‘son forevermore,’ and Chamoiseau identified him as the “maître-marronneur” ‘master Maroon.’ This wave of adulation tends to emphasize the militant poet-politician that Césaire never quite was. He was arguably the founder neither of a nation nor of a people nor, for that matter, of a movement. While he coined the word négritude, he was less the founder of the negritude movement than was his contemporary Léopold Sédar Senghor, who set about creating a totalizing, biologically based ideology around the concept of negritude. Perhaps even more telling is his view of the Haitian leader Henry Christophe as tragically flawed because of Christophe's obsession with founding a people. The protagonist of the play La tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe) is a heedless builder, so obsessed by the need to construct and to found that he destroys himself, leaving behind the massive stone ship of the Citadelle as his legacy.

For Several Decades, Scholars have Believed, for Lack of Evidence to the Contrary, That Négritude—One of the Key Terms of identity formation in the twentieth century—appeared in print for the first time in Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), in 1939. This consensus reflects a revision of what the cofounders (with Césaire) of the negritude movement, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas, had remembered and stated. Senghor said in 1959 that “the word [négritude] was invented by Césaire in an article in the newspaper that bore the title L'Etudiant noir” (qtd. in Ako 347). In an interview published in 1980, Damas said, “Césaire coined this word in L'Etudiant noir” (qtd. in Ako 348). But L‘étudiant noir was a phantom. Lilyan Kesteloot, in her groundbreaking study Black Writers in French, attempted to summarize the content of L‘étudiant noir without seeing a single issue of it; none was available to her (84n2).

Before Undertaking This Essay, I was Afraid That I had Nothing New to Say About Aimé Césaire's Work. I WAS RIGHT AND WRONG. What can I tell you that you have not heard a thousand times? That Césaire was born in Martinique in 1913? That he studied in Paris with Léopold Sédar Senghor? That his return to his island, just before World War II, is celebrated in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land)? That he is one of the founders of negritude? Either you already know all this and much more about Césaire's work, or such facts and figures (i.e., stories that have produced an effect of truth) are so readily available to trained scholars that my intervention is pointless. Since the poet's death, in 2008, all the facets of his life and work are being reread and reexamined. The flow of information about them ranges from illuminating presentations (Scharfman; Irele; Smith) to the most sophisticated analyses of his literary and political work (Arnold, “Forty Years”; Eshleman; Brent; Wilder).

As the Nineteenth Century was the Century of Colonization, The Twentieth Century was the Century of Decolonization, THE neologism entered popular usage during the 1950s, gained sudden prestige, and was declared crucial and, indeed, “beautiful” by Aimé Fernand David Césaire (“L'homme” 116). Césaire lived at the center of the global tempest and cultural sea change that characterized the anticolonial, civil rights, independence-movement years from 1932 to 1968. Césaire's rhetorical virtuosity and intellectual genius coincided with a moment of worldwide paradigm shifts and conceptual earthquakes, or tremblements de concepts, as he termed them (“Culture” 453). Césaire embodied what Edward Said called the “sensuous particularity as well as historical contingency” of a man living on the borderline of historical transition (39). On the actors, artists, and intellectuals of this borderline moment, the Senegalese writer Mariama Bâ reflected that it was the “[p]rivilège de notre génération, charnière entre deux périodes historiques, l'une de domination, l'autre d'indépendance. Nous … étions porteurs de projets” ‘privilege of our generation to be the link between two periods in our history, one of domination, the other of independence. We … were the messengers of a new design’ (Une si longue lettre 40 [So Long a Letter 25]). According to Césaire, the messengers had duties:

Let Me Begin with a Decidedly Non-Jewish Reference, in Order to Both Place and Displace Jewish Studies. In Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, an evocation of imaginary places that emerge and recede from memory, all eventually turning out to be the same place, Marco Polo says to Kubla Kahn, in response to the charge that he has not spoken of Venice: “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice” (86). The notion of Venice as implicit in every city strikes me as an apt analogy for what I will be claiming as the possible relation between Jewish studies and literary studies. As a faculty member housed in a national literature department (German) at a public research university dominated by a biennial funding battle with the state legislature, I move between reading the minutes of the University Senate and reading Calvino's Invisible Cities in order to imagine the invisible universities or invisible studies beyond the prairie and, indeed, beyond the notion of the university (and the humanities) in ruin.

In 1974 the Yiddish Poet Malka Heifetz Tussman, Born in Russia, Living in California, Published a Small Volume of Poems in Israel. This peripatetic author and text are paradigmatic of the cosmopolitan, multilingual nature of modern Jewish literature. The book, by a woman who was at various times a Yiddish teacher, an anarchist, and a writer of Russian poetry and English essays, was entitled ‘Under Your Sign.’ As the title indicates, the politics and poetics of sign systems are central concerns of this volume. I offer a few stanzas from one of its poems— ‘Widowhood’—to suggest the multiplicity of the signs of Jewish identity and literature. What we see in Tussman's poem, and more dramatically when we supplement it with two English translations, is that although it rails against the ways in which the sign (e.g., letter, word, trope) destroys, it also points to the sign's generative powers. And the poem offers a way of understanding the creative tensions that have dominated critical and creative expressions of modern Jewish literature. Under the signs of “Hebraism” and “Yiddishism,” we encounter two conflicting but equally productive views of Jewish literature, one that posits continuity and another that posits adaptation as the defining characteristic of Jewish culture. Tussman's poem, like these different paradigms of Jewish literary history, enables us to use the sign as a way of overcoming the divide between two languages and two views of the (Jewish and non-Jewish) world. My goal in what follows is not to protest against the reign of the sign on behalf of some notion of Jewish authenticity. To the contrary, I propose yet another sign—structured as a binary—to highlight the ambivalence of the sign “Jewish literature” and to stimulate debate about matters Jewish and what matters to Jews.

Hmm! A State-of-the-Art Essay About the Vvhereabouts of Theory Today? Should Such an Essay Be About Anything at all, considering the antirepresentational stance of radical theory? How does one write about theory, except self-reflexively (a question that Butler, Guillory, and Thomas raise)? If I did that, would I be guilty of professional narcissism, or would my rigorous self-reflexivity have a referent, whether the referent is called reality, the world, history, or experience? Would I be successful in combining the nuances and rigors of self-reflexive thinking with the mandate of having to say something about something?

Biographical Research at the Massachusetts Historical Society has Discovered in The 1773 Diary of Jeremy Belknap (1744-98), a Congregationalist clergyman, what is likely a text by Phillis Wheatley that predates any known before now. Belknap's diary is interleaved in Bickerstaff's Boston Almanack. For the Year of Our Lord, 1773. The last page includes a twenty-word poem in Belknap's hand that he identifies as “Phillis Wheatley's first Effort———-AD 1765. EE 11.” Belknap transcribes the text twice. The first version is in three lines, as if he could not decide whether it was prose or poetry, with an inserted two-word phrase placed above the first line and located by a caret below it:

Introduction: The Francophone Uncle Tom's Cabin

The Overlooked American Francophone Novel Le Vieux Salomon, Ou Une Famille D'Esclaves Au XIXE Siècle (OLD SOLOMON; OR, A Slave Family in the Nineteenth Century), by Charles Testut (1819-92), offers a contemporaneous description of slavery as a global commerce with international causes and effects. The novel's geographic scope, as well as Testut's interest in contrasting the life in the French Caribbean with slavery in the United States, makes Old Solomon an ideal text through which to examine the representation of economic and cultural circulation in the Americas. Old Solomon is a clear response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), with some similar characters and situations, but is more trangressive and violent.

As many articles in the March 2009 issue of PMLA imply, the question of ability is central to any consideration of the human. For example, in “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities” (124.2 [2009]: 564–75), Cary Wolfe shows how the humanities transgresses its own limits and thereby shifts its locus and center. Insofar as this broad area of study is the appropriate venue for reflection on the discursive boundary of the human, it must erase that boundary.

As many articles in the March 2009 issue of PMLA imply, the question of ability is central to any consideration of the human. For example, in “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities” (124.2 [2009]: 564–75), Cary Wolfe shows how the humanities transgresses its own limits and thereby shifts its locus and center. Insofar as this broad area of study is the appropriate venue for reflection on the discursive boundary of the human, it must erase that boundary.

As many articles in the March 2009 issue of PMLA imply, the question of ability is central to any consideration of the human. For example, in “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities” (124.2 [2009]: 564–75), Cary Wolfe shows how the humanities transgresses its own limits and thereby shifts its locus and center. Insofar as this broad area of study is the appropriate venue for reflection on the discursive boundary of the human, it must erase that boundary.

As many articles in the March 2009 issue of PMLA imply, the question of ability is central to any consideration of the human. For example, in “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities” (124.2 [2009]: 564–75), Cary Wolfe shows how the humanities transgresses its own limits and thereby shifts its locus and center. Insofar as this broad area of study is the appropriate venue for reflection on the discursive boundary of the human, it must erase that boundary.

I Am Pleased to Report on the Association's Activities in 2009, a year in which the seventh edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers was published. The new edition, sent free to members, contains significant updates to MLA citation style and offers an electronic component for the first time. Another project in 2009, the Academic Workforce Advocacy Kit on the MLA Web site, brings together documents that equip members to work for long-term change in employment conditions. New online benefits of MLA membership include the Directory of Periodicals, a customizable convention program, and self-nomination forms for committee membership. Although the MLA, like all associations and academic institutions, has felt the effects of the economic recession, our membership and finances remained strong in 2009.

The Delegate Assembly MET on 29 December 2009 at the Philadelphia Marriott Hotel. First Vice President Sidonie Smith presided. The assembly was called to order at 1:16 p.m. The chair recognized Delegate Ana-María Medina, who made a statement recognizing the life and work of Chris Bell, a fellow delegate who had died just before the convention. The chair asked all in attendance to stand for a moment of remembrance. The chair then made preliminary announcements about the conduct of the meeting, called for a demonstration of the electronic voting system to be used during the meeting and an explanation of the warning-light system that had been installed at the podium to let speakers know how much of their allotted time remained, and noted that she would be exercising her right to vote during the meeting. She announced the quorum for the meeting, which was 80 delegates, because 159 delegates had signed in for the meeting at the beginning. [Note: of the 272 delegates, 189 (69%) attended all or part of the meeting (see the list that follows for the names of the delegates in attendance).]

The Council Met on 30-31 October 2009 at the MLA Office in New York. President Catherine Porter presided. The officers present were First Vice President Sidonie Smith, Second Vice President Russell A. Berman, and Executive Director Rosemary G. Feal. The Executive Council members present were Carlos J. Alonso, Charles Altieri, Sara Scott Armengot, Dorian F. Bell, Jennifer Crewe, Anne Ruggles Gere (30 Oct. only), Jane Harper, George Levine, Paula Rabinowitz, Lynne Tatlock, Alexandra K. Wettlaufer, and Kathleen Woodward. Executive Council member Francis Abiola Irele was absent. The MLA staff members present were Director of Operations Terrence Callaghan, Director of Bibliographic Information Services and Editor of the MLA International Bibliography Barbara Chen, Director of Programs and ADFL Nelly Furman, Managing Editor of MLA Publications and Director of Publishing Operations Judy Goulding, Director of Financial Operations Amilde Hadden (30 Oct. only), Director of Convention Programs Maribeth T. Kraus, Director of Research and ADE David Laurence, Director of Book Publications David G. Nicholls, and Assistant to the Executive Director and Coordinator of Governance Carol Zuses.