Some Things Don't Change Much. One Hundred and Fourteen years ago, at an MLA conference in Champaign, Illinois, the president of the Central Division, the Germanist James Taft Hatfield of Northwestern University, delivered an address on “the relation of scholarship to the commonwealth,” which I recognize as a version of this year's theme, Literature and Its Publics. When the address was published later in PMLA, the account of it went as follows: “the remarks of the President were clear, incisive, sparkling, and proved an excellent introduction to one of the most interesting meetings” of the association. (The minutes go on to share the secretary's concern that the conference has too many papers, which run too long, and to record the balance in the Central Division's funds: $1.33 [“Proceedings” lxxv].)

Keats's tracks into the nineteenth century angle toward a “modernism” often defined at his expense—yet with latent identifications. In relations of past and present, figurai identifications may register in nuances different from conscious allusion or the psychodramas of influence, ravages and resistance, hauntings and felt belatedness that issue in self-interested misreadings. “Latent Keats” and “Latent Yeats” play into an important, underreported current in both Keats studies and Yeats studies: a “Long Romanticism” in intimate verbal figures that trouble any “Modernism” of definitional difference from “Romantic.” Keats's writing harbors figures to which Yeats could respond, even correspond, vexed as he was by “Keats” as the name for the puerile outsider's dreamy sensuousness that a proper “modernist” needed to spurn. Such complication is one of the variable formations by which a “modernist” program manages to conjure the “Romantic” precedence it would supersede.

R. K. Narayan's work has been faulted for its sidestepping of the brutal realities of colonial rule. Yet Narayan stages, in the dreaminess of his fictionalized township of Malgudi, the unwriting or undermining of the logics of language that subtend colonial rule. The author has fashioned a way to write about India that displays the vacuity of the colonial model of governance and, through his tales of failed authorship, points to something other. Emerging in his comic episodes and in his baffled protagonists is a recognition of the importance of keeping things unsettled, in suspension, or visible only in their negation. Narayan, this essay argues through a series of questions that underscore the uncertainty in his world, imagines passivity as an interruption of the progressive, purposive, and productive time that defines modernity.

Performing a historicized analysis of John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925), this essay returns this understudied author to the center stage of modernist studies and includes the popular stage in accounts of the technologized mechanisms of modernist writing. By disclosing a deep correlation between the composite narrative tactics of Dos Passos's multilinear novel and the mass entertainments of this period, particularly Florenz Ziegfeld's annual Follies revues, it supplies new parameters for theorizing strategies of narration and characterization in modernist fiction vis-à-vis the technologies of popular entertainment and display in the early twentieth century. The discussion of Dos Passos's broad critique of the gendered specular economy of the modern metropolis in the era of Taylorism repositions his early writing as integral to the development of high modernism in the 1920s.

Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904), an early collection of stories for children by Charles Alexander Eastman, a Dako$$ta author, was largely viewed by his critical contemporaries as a politically innocuous analogue to Kipling's Jungle Book Stories. Through consideration of the Dako$$ta oral-historical genre of hituᒋkaᒋkaᒋpi (“long ago stories”) and of Dako$$ta peoplehood more broadly, this article proposes an alternative view of Eastman as a resistance writer who cited a long-circulating Dako$$ta kinship philosophy to criticize the enduring conditions of United States settler colonialism—a criticism that would become more pointed in his later, better-known autobiography, From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1915). In viewing Eastman's animal tales as opposed to United States colonialism, we may see more clearly his innovative translations of Dako$$ta politics into narratives that both appealed to and challenged United States settler society. These challenges were made in relation to Dako$$ta conceptions of peoplehood, power, and gift.

This essay explores how Edwin Arnold's epic poem The Light of Asia (1879) popularized a formal analogy between Buddhism and Christianity. The poem was based on a series of missionary texts that had reshaped the Buddha's career into a close approximation of Jesus's in order to frame Buddhism as a fit object of Protestant conversion. Early anglophone readers in Sri Lanka, however, took it as evidence of Buddhism's equal stature and thus helped make The Light of Asia an international best seller and a touchstone for popular Buddhist nationalisms in the twentieth century. In this way Arnold's poem allows us to develop a more complex sense both of how literary forms globalize—how a literary construct can take on global purchase precisely because readers disagree over its meaning—and of the powerful role that specific literary media play in influencing these different interpretations.

Based on an analysis of three literary texts about Dayaks—the indigenous peoples of Kalimantan (Borneo) in Indonesia—this essay argues that strategic submission can play an important role in indigenous peoples' attempts to obtain and maintain agency under the shadow of dominant discourse. Discussions foundational to the field of postcolonial studies have tended to focus on the importance of subversion, resistance, and counterdiscourse in liberating the oppressed subject. Taking reading cues from anthropological and sociological accounts of Dayak compliance with various constructions of Dayaks, this essay looks at how the writing of literature about Dayaks (by both non-Dayaks and Dayaks) functions as an enactment of and meditation on the application of dominant discourse to indigenous peoples and the opportunities that such discourse affords for carving out spaces of autonomy.

The Cuban Revolution Generated a New Communist Paranoia in the United States. Interest in Latin America Grew Dramatically after Castro's rise to power in 1959 and was partly responsible for the explosive growth in the number of scholars specializing in hemispheric issues during the 1960s. Latin Americans, in turn, saw this phase of the Cold War as a furthering of imperial aggression by the United States. The Eisenhower administration's authoritarian diplomatic maneuvers to isolate Guatemala by accusing the country's democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz (1950-54), of being a communist and by pressuring members of the Organization of American States to do likewise had already alarmed intellectuals and artists in Latin America five years before. On 17 June 1954, Carlos Castillo Armas and a band of a few hundred mercenaries invaded the country from Honduras with logistical support from the Central Intelligence Agency in an operation code-named PBSUCCESS, authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953. By 1 July 1954 the so-called Movement of National Liberation had taken over Guatemala. Angela Fillingim's research evidences how the United States officially viewed Guatemala as “Pre-Western,” according to “pre-established criteria,” because the Latin American country had failed to eliminate its indigenous population (5-6). Implicitly, the model was that of the nineteenth-century American West. As a solution, the State Department proposed “finishing the Conquest.”

The Photograph is violent.

—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Who are you, who will look at these photographs, and by what right, and what will you do about it?

—James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

In His Entry for Eye in Le Dictionnaire Critique (1929-30), Georges Bataille Refers to the Human Compulsion to Look as a response to a “blind thirst for blood,” triggered by the spectacle of extreme violence, including torture. But why, Bataille wonders, would someone's “absurd eyes be attracted, like a cloud of flies, to something so repugnant?” (19). He attributes to the human eye the cannibalistic disposition that comes from our “inexplicable acuity of horrors” and from the disturbing fascination that the eye itself exerts over our sensibility. The extreme seductiveness of the eye, Bataille hints, is probably “at the very edge of horror” (17). He connects the unstable edge that separates such contradictory responses with the idea of the eye as a critical tool, in which “critical” refers to the act of discerning and the act of cutting—as shown in the infamous opening of Tuis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's film Un chien andalou (“An Andalusian Dog” [1929]), when the eye of a young woman is sliced open by a razor in front of the camera. This violence against embodied (and sexualized) vision points not only to the notion of the eye as a misleading mimetic apparatus but also to the image of the eye as a hole or gap. The split eye is resignified as ocular replication, which, unexpectedly, triggers the proliferation of images and the loss of sight that come from seeing too much. Indeed, the swarm of eyes that populates Bataille's visual imagery grimly alludes to the compulsion to watch violent acts to the point of blindness.

Historical Narrative and Memory: The Former is Usually the Site of Power; the Latter, for Jean Franco in Cruel Modernity, is the site of force. Historical narrative represents Latin American nations as emerging—or, in Brazil's case, emerged—markets progressing on a seamless curve toward a glossy, technologically sophisticated, communicative hypermodernity, whereas memory is the desperate, slow, brute force of the people who refuse to forget the unmitigated cruelty of the second half of the twentieth century in Latin America. Memory here is the continental but subaltern force of family and friends who are still noisily waiting to bury the broken remains of their disappeared sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, comrades in hope or children of a utopic vision. Forensic subaltern memories document the phantasmagoric crimes committed against fragmented and maimed bodies, buried in mass graves or in the depths of lakes from Patagonia to the border between Mexico and the United States, interrupting the gleaming historical narratives that describe the slow but steady progress toward national development. In Cruel Modernity, Franco is part of this force: she is a forensic memory worker, examining the crime scenes, the tortured, raped, mutilated bodies, describing in awful detail who did what to whom, with what instruments, and in what order. One of the most striking aspects of Cruel Modernity is Franco's refusal to look away. Each chapter provides “thick description” of these crimes, as Franco tries to comprehend the excess of the acts perpetrated, the motivations of the perpetrators, the effects on the victims. Several rationales

Among The Many Significant Contributions of Raúl Coronado's A World Not to Come: A History Of Latino Writing and Print Culture is its vivid account of a lost Latino public sphere, a little-known milieu of hispanophone intellectual culture dating back to the early nineteenth century and formed in the historical interstices of Spanish American colonies, emergent Latin American nations, and the early imperial interests of the United States. In this respect, the book builds on the foundational work of Kirsten Silva Gruesz's Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing, which gave definitive shape to the field of early Latino studies by addressing what were then (and in some ways still are) the “methodological problems of proposing to locate the ‘origins’ of Latino writing in the nineteenth century.” Gruesz unfolded a vast panorama of forgotten Spanish-language print culture throughout the United States, from Philadelphia and New York to New Orleans and California, in which letters, stories, essays, and above all poetry bequeathed what she showed convincingly were “important, even crucial, ways of understanding the world” that had been largely lost to history (x). Coronado's book carries forward this project of recovery, exploring a particular scene of early Latino writing centered in Texas during its last revolutionary decades as one of the Interior Provinces of New Spain, its abrupt transition to an independent republic, and its eventual annexation by the United States. As a “history of textuality” rather than a study of literary culture per se (28), the book tells the story of the first printing presses in Texas but also evinces the importance of manuscript circulation as well as private and sometimes unfinished texts. A World Not to Come concerns both print culture and origins but refuses to fetishize either, attending to the past not to “the degree that it is a measure of the future,” as Rosaura Sánchez once put it, but for the very opposite reason: because it portended a future that was never realized (qtd. in Gruesz, Ambassadors xi).

Considering that it was summertime, the weather in New England was puzzlingly cold. Nonetheless, the men in the seabeaten wooden ship offered thanks, in the Protestant fashion, for the bounty of fresh provisions: oysters and seals; vast herds of deer, tule elk, and pronghorn. Mutual curiosity informed their encounters with the people they met. The English admired their extraordinary basketwork, their shell ornaments, their headpieces of brilliant black condor feathers.

If the bio- and ethnoscapes of this New England sketch seem a little off, it is because I have moved its longitudal coordinates west by fifty degrees and spun the time setting of an originary North American encounter back by several decades. The English sailors and supplicants were not Puritan separatists but the remainder of Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation expedition, which made landfall along the Pacific coast—by most estimates, in northern California—in 1579. The story of their several weeks' stay there is speculative in many senses. The fortuitously named Golden Hind returned loaded with treasure; the marker that Drake supposedly placed near his landfall buttressed unfulfilled English territorial claims for many years after; and in our own day historians, anthropologists, and geographers both trained and untrained continue to debate the precise location of Nova Albion. This is the very stuff of which counterfactual histories and speculative historical fictions are made: what if other Englishmen had later returned with settlers and supplies? If the English colonial project along the North American Pacific had rooted itself earlier, and farther south than Vancouver, would its later pattern of settlement have pulsed west to east across the continent instead of east to west?

Raúl Coronado'S Ambitious and Beautifully Realized Book About The Literature Of Failed Republican Revolution in Late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Texas is a major contribution to the expanding field of scholarship that recovers, contextualizes, and interprets Tatino/a writing. This wide-ranging study traces the influence of scholastic thought in Spain and Spanish America, culminating in a discussion of the resonances of that intellectual tradition after 1848, as newly conquered Tejanos faced expropriation and violence by United States Americans. Coronado shows how the ideas of Thomas Aquinas and his Spanish interpreters—notably Francisco Suárez (1548-1617), a Jesuit and the leading member of the Thomist School of Salamanca, whose ideas were broadly influential in the Hispanic world—presented a durable alternative to the liberal philosophy of John Tocke and Adam Smith. In part through Suárez's influence, the Roman Catholic concept of the corpus mysticum fed into a distinctive vision of the modern republic that elevated the pueblo over the individual. That this alternative tradition failed initially to gain political and cultural ground explains the melancholy title of Coronado's study, while the possibility of recuperating this history as a usable past animates the project as a whole.

How Do Printed Objects Help Political Subjects Make and Remake Worlds? This is One of the Central Questions Animating Raúl Coronado's brilliant book A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture. I believe Coronado is one of the most gifted and imaginative literary scholars working today. What is more rare, his writing is both provocative and a pleasure to read. Casting himself as a genealogist, he deploys previously little-known printed materials to tell a dramatic story, and he tells it with a narrative confidence seldom seen in studies that rely, as his ultimately does, so heavily on the close reading of texts.

In a series of discontinuous but deeply contextualized studies situated on the borderlands of Mexico and the United States, advancing from the 1810s to the 1850s and taking readers at times much further back (into, say, the diffusion of scholastic thought), Coronado traces a history of foreclosed revolutionary possibilities, of discursive dead ends and epistemological ruptures, and of the failure of communities to become anything but imagined. He probes understudied people, texts, and episodes for what they can tell us about the complex processes of the experience of modernization—and by modernization he means the major movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for republicanism, capitalism, individualism, secularism, and nationalism. He uses this discontinuous narrative also to arrest what he takes to be a misguided quest among some in his field for a different kind of genealogy: an unbroken lineage of Latino identity and subjectivity that centers on resistance. Instead, he narrates the making of a people as the unintended consequence of individuals who had hoped and failed to make a nation.

I Spent Muggy Chicago Summers Indoors, Tapping at my Keyboard, Churning Out Pages of My Book Manuscript, Following the paths of people's lives, obsessing over the right turn of phrase. When I grew lonely (which I always inevitably did), I'd head out to the Starbucks on Wilson and Magnolia, comforting myself with the sounds of people around me. I wrote better late at night, when night had descended and lulled everyone to sleep. I felt then a great sense of relief, tranquility, buoyed by nothing else but the swirl of ideas, because everyone around me in my world had settled down for the night. It was then that I was not distracted by the world of the living. Summer in Chicago, after all, was an exuberantly social season. The city exploded with life; throngs of runners would peel their shirts off in the humid heat as they sprinted along Lakefront Trail. But for me, invitations to barbecues, beach parties, and weekend getaways to Saugatuck were left unanswered: I had my book to write.