In 1966 Auguste Toussaint, the Mauritian Archivist, Wrote One of the First Histories of the Indian Ocean, a Topic he Described as “neglected” (1). Four decades on, circumstances have shifted, and the Indian Ocean now compels our attention. Audacious Somali pirates astound international media audiences. The new economic superpowers, India and China, exert palpable global influence. Their internecine competition plays itself out in the Indian Ocean, where the two Asian powers squabble for control of shipping lanes and oil supplies and for dominance of African markets and minerals (Vines and Oruitemeka; Broadman). Al-Qaeda continues to operate around the Indian Ocean littoral: its targets have included United States interests in Tanzania, Kenya, Comoros, Indonesia, and Yemen. United States imperialism itself persists in the Indian Ocean world, waning in Iraq but entrenched in Diego Garcia, the United States-occupied atoll from which bombing raids on Afghanistan and Iraq were launched.

Understanding the receptivity of literature, how one work admits many readers, begins with an analogy: unity is to text as identity is to self. Unity here means the way all a text’s features can be related through one central theme. Identity describes a person’s sameness within different behaviors as variations on one identity theme (Lichtenstein). To find unity or identity, however, the interpreter himself plays a behavioral variation on his identity theme. In interpreting, his identity re-creates itself as he shapes the text to match his characteristic defenses, fantasies, and coherences. Thus, what a poet says about fictional, political, or scientific texts expresses the same identity theme as the poems he writes. To understand reading, criticism, and any knowing or making in symbols, then, we need to let go the Cartesian craving for objectivity and accept the themes in ourselves with which we construe the world—including literary works.

Baghdad, Banda Aceh, Beirut, Detroit, Dhaka, Harare, New Orleans. In these times chronicling the devastation and annihilation of cities—through capital flight, natural disaster, slum eviction, and war—I gravitate to stories about restoring ruined cities. Halfway through Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut's novel about the firebombing of Dresden, we find an eccentric scene. After surviving Dresden's conflagration, Billy Pilgrim, optician and ex-GI, escapes traumatic memories by becoming “unstuck in time” (93). He journeys with the Tralfamadorians, creatures from outer space who teach him to time-switch so that he can move fluidly through his own private and public histories. Finding a war movie intolerable, Pilgrim imagines it in reverse: “American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen.” Pilgrim changes space by changing time. German guns suck bomb fragments from wounded American airmen as “the formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes” (93–94). How can we shelter or care for, how can we nurture, the ruined city in the belly of the text?

This essay, while referring particularly to commentary about Renaissance drama, examines the new historicism more generally as one of the most powerful and interesting forms of criticism on the contemporary scene. How do new-historicist critics characterize the text? What do they mean by history? How do they understand the relation between the two? And finally, are there other, arguably more useful kinds of answers available to us than the ones the new historicists typically provide?

What exactly are genres? Are they a classifying system matching the phenomenal world of objects, a sorting principle that separates oranges from apples? Or are they less than that, a taxonomy that never fully taxonomizes, labels that never quite keep things straight? What archives come with genres, what critical lexicons do they offer, and what maps do they yield? And how does the rise of digitization change these archives, lexicons, and maps?

Reading isn't what it was. As we enter the “late age of print,” E-Books are still less common than “P-Books” (printed books), but the balance is quickly changing, especially in the world of academic publishing (Striphas xii). While many lament the loss of the p-book's materiality, texts have become more lively as a result of digitization: textual-production platforms like blogging let writers and readers interact with each other and create intimate social relationships. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick found while writing her book Planned Obsolescence using CommentPress, an online platform that enables readers' commenting, writing can become a more social and creative process when done in dialogue with readers. This turn to the social in writing parallels a turn to the social in media generally. Thus, it makes sense to evaluate not how far our devices are taking us from paper—the answer is already pretty far—but rather how digital media are creating new social valences of reading.

Kawsay in Colonial and Postcolonial Borderlands

The personage of Huatya Curi, the “Baked Potato Gleaner,” figured prominently in an early colonial account of the landscape and religious mythology of the Andean people of Huarochirí, a province in the mountainous interior of Lima in the Viceroyalty of Peru. The Huarochirí manuscript, a sixteenth-century Quechua document, introduces Huatya Curi with these words: “Chay pacha cay huatya curi ñisca huacchalla micuspapas huatya cuspalla causaptinsi sutiachircan huatya curim ñispa …” ‘At that time Huatya Curi, a poor potato eater, was accustomed to living from gleaning baked potatoes, and for that reason people named him Huatya Curi …‘ (Salomon and Urioste 163; my trans.; see also Taylor 32–33). While poor, Huatya Curi was powerful; in the same passage he goes on to vanquish a mighty Andean lord, Tamta Ñamca. The demise of Tamta Ñamca sets the stage for the ascendance of Paria Caca, Huatya Curi's father, who emerges as the chief Andean deity. Huatya Curi's existence is earthly yet linked to his supernatural lineage.

Innovation in cultural practice is both an act and an event whereby the other is brought into and comes into being. I call the private aspect of this process creation and the public aspect, by which innovation gives rise to further innovation, invention. A related phenomenon is the responsible encounter with the human other; in both, the subject's modes of understanding undergo change as the subject registers and affirms the singularity of the other. A further domain to which this account applies is reading, another act-event in which a responsible response entails an innovative affirmation of innovation. Responding to the literary work involves performing its verbal forms. The responsibility invoked in all these instances is responsibility for rather than to, since the other is brought into existence (and transformed from other to same) by the subject's response. The ethical obligation implied here is, as Levinas argues, prior to any philosophical account we could give of it.

Translingual writing is all the rage among scholars and teachers of writing studies in the united states. The last decade has seen a plethora of publications on this topic, many of which have received prestigious awards, and conferences have highlighted translingual writing and related topics. It seems that translingual writing has established itself as an intellectual movement. The attention to language in United States writing studies—a field that has traditionally found ways to dissociate itself from language—is a welcome change. At the same time, I am uneasy about the term translingual writing because, as the enthusiasm for this new and evolving intellectual endeavor continues to grow, the notion of translingual writing seems to be uncritically accepted and celebrated.

While the return of queer is usually explained locally as an oppressed minority's positive reunderstanding of a negative word, as the adoption of an umbrella to cover diverse marginal subjectivities, or as a sign of generational difference, the term's reappearance must instead be historicized—systematically and globally—as one of the theoretical, cultural, and social changes that result from the uncritical acceptance (for class reasons) of the premises of ludic (post)modern theory in the dominant academy and the culture industry. By elevating the category of desire (mode of signification) and occluding the category of need (mode of production), ludic theory encourages the notion that in advanced technoculture, mutant subjectivities—such as the “cyberqueer”—occupy a new and freeing virtual reality of desire beyond mere need where they can write their own histories instead of being written by history. In the end, (cyber)queerity is but a new expression of an old class ideology.

There is a passage in David Lodge's 1988 Novel nice work in which the heroine, a marxist-feminist critic who teaches English literature, looks out the window of an airplane and sees the division of labor.

Can We Hope for a theory of romanticism? The answer, I believe, is, Yes. But before proceeding further, I must make quite clear what it is that I propose to discuss.

Changing conceptions of gender and of theatrical mimesis can be seen in the representations of transvestite heroines on the English Renaissance stage. This paper compares their roles in five comedies: Lyly's Gallathea; Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night; and Jonson's Epicoene. In each play the plot centers on marriage, the bride-to-be wears transvestite disguise, and the disguise plays a crucial role in the plot. In all five plays, the sexual ambiguity of the boy heroine is associated with the problematic relations between the male actor and the female character he portrays, the dramatic representation and the reality it imitates, the play and the audience that watches it. Increasingly rigid gender definitions and a devaluation of the feminine are associated with a rejection of fantasy, the development of neoclassical mimetic theory, and a deepening anxiety about the process of theatrical representation.

Women's hair, particularly when it is golden, has always been a preoccupation of Western artists and writers. But for the Victorians, who discovered complex totemic and symbolic significance in the image of women's hair, it became an obsession. The powerful woman mythologized in Victorian literature and art achieved her vitality partly through her hair, which both contributed to and expressed her magic power. She used her hair to weave her discourse and to spin her plots, to strangle her lovers and to shelter them, to build deadly snares and webs and to proclaim her own divinity and glory.

The first few frames of the Belgian comic-strip artist Raymond Macherot's work “Les Croquillards” (1957) provide a shorthand for some of the issues that concern environmentally oriented criticism, one of the most recent fields of research to have emerged from the rapidly diversifying matrix of literary and cultural studies in the 1990s. A heron is prompted to a lyrical reflection on the change of seasons by a leaf that gently floats down to the surface of his pond (see the next p.): “Ah! the poetry of autumn … dying leaves, wind, departing birds…” This last thought jolts him back to reality: “But—I'm a migratory bird myself! … Good grief! What've I been thinking?” And off he takes on his voyage south, only to be hailed by the protagonists, the field rats Chlorophylle and Minimum (the latter under the spell of a bad cold), who hitch a ride to Africa with him. “Are you traveling on business?” he asks his newfound passengers. “No, for our health,” they answer.

Perhaps the most fruitful and exciting development in Old English studies in recent years has followed from F. P. Magoun's discovery that the Parry-Lord theory of oral verse-making can be applied to Old English poetry. This theory has caught the imagination of critics and has produced a “kind of revolution in scholarly opinion” not simply because it shows us that the style of this poetry is traditional—that has been known for many years—but because it offers a new and useful way of approaching the problems raised by this style, because it provides a new way of considering some of the relations between these poems, and because it casts light on an area that we thought was forever darkened, the pre-literary history of Germanic and Old English verse.

There is a crisis in drama studies that is reflected in the ways different disciplines understand dramatic texts and performance. Literary studies, absorbed with the functioning of language, often betrays a desire to locate the meanings of the stage in the dramatic text. Performance studies has developed a vivid account of nondramatic performance, which appears to depart from textual authority. Both disciplines, however, view drama as a species of performance driven by its text; as a result, drama appears as an unduly authorized mode of performance. Here, I read a range of critics (Andrew Parker. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler on J. L. Austin; Dwight Conquergood on ethnography; Joseph Roach on surrogation) to suggest ways of rethinking the relations of authority that inform texts and performances. I conclude with a glance at the representation of the text in Baz Luhrmann's recent film William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Emerson's prose speaks to American expectations for becoming a man. His most forceful rhetoric unmans the manly types, particularly his censorious father, with an imperious nonchalance. Emerson's “man-making words” also transform the class conflicts that intensified the ideology of manhood from 1825 to 1850. Dreaming of a new elite, Emerson challenges social definitions of manhood and power. He does not, however, question the code that joins manhood with power at the expense of intimacy. When power fails him, as “Experience” recounts, his seeming candor masks an evasive note of depressive accusation directed at the women who take care of him. To emphasize Emerson's class and gender politics deflates his reputation somewhat. As “representative man” he represents only a liberal tradition that mystifies conflicts. Yet we can see him more clearly as a man, struggling with himself as well as with his time.

The work of the distinguished French political theorist and philosopher Etienne Balibar has emerged as profoundly significant in shaping post-1968 debates around class, race, national sovereignty, citizenship, and international human rights. The following essay is particularly relevant to this issue of PMLA insofar as the essay signals the importance of the border as a limit case for globalization and reflects on what the philosophical bases of citizenship would be in a postnational order of Europe.

Borders, Balibar suggests, are products of the state's attributing to itself a right to property, which becomes, in turn, a limit case of institutions (their means of self-stabilization) that allows them to control subjects rather than be subject to their control. The police power of border control is the state's most undemocratic condition, its discretionary exemption from democracy. To democratize the border, he maintains, one must democratize this nondemocratic aspect of democratic sovereignty, a task that would be juridically difficult but that would be an act of political realism none the less, since borders inevitably shift whether nations want them to or not, redefined by socially trans bordered, culturally transnational, and economically global spaces.