My substitution in the hoary formulation what was x? must seem perverse. isn't latino literature in the united states a newcomer among subfields—a recent entry on the roster of MLA book prizes, a fast-growing site of knowledge production, faculty lines, and institutional visibility? How could that field of the future—propelled by a demographic surge—be already a thing of the past? It is to worry this commonsensical temporality of Latino issues that I invoke the title of Kenneth Warren's What Was African American Literature?, published in early 2011. In a neat coincidence, Warren's book was published in the same season as the first-ever Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (NALL), a project spearheaded by Ilan Stavans with the collaboration of five editors. Both publishing events sparked discussion beyond the academy among the shrinking general audience interested in literary culture; taken together, they illustrate the peculiar exigencies of periodizing ethnic literatures.

In phenomenology of spirit (1807), G. W. F. Hegel employs the figures of the “lord” and “bondsman” to explain the struggle between an independent and a dependent self-consciousness in the aftermath of what he calls the “trial by death” or “life-and-death struggle.” Commonly cited today as the “master-slave dialectic,” this complex, foundational theory of the subject relies on metaphors that compel us to ask whether consciousness can be represented through language. Hegel's recourse to these metaphors has produced two broad tendencies in the understanding of and approach to “master” and “slave” in the philosopher's theory. Many current interpreters of the dialectic practice a phylogenetic reading, in which both figures are taken as historical subjects whose documented interpersonal relations provide empirical proof of slavery's practices. By contrast, most Continental philosophers perform an ontogenetic reading, in which they consider the relations between master and slave to be intrapersonal and regard these figures as metaphors that can be used to explain precise moments in the speculative processes of consciousness. Deciding to read the master-slave dialectic as either a struggle between two individuals or a struggle between two forms of consciousness within the subject has important theoretical and methodological consequences that I would like to describe and examine, especially as they pertain to the meanings of work in slavery. Whereas the slave's work has traditionally and accurately been understood as physical labor externally enforced by the master, less critical attention has been paid to reading the slave's work ontogenetically, as an internal struggle for the freedom of self-mastery. Such an ontogenetic reading provides valuable insights into ubiquitous but less frequently studied forms of resistance from within slavery.

It seemed like a good idea while it lasted, but we should have known it could not last. the era of sustainability is over. behind our shared cultural narratives of sustainability sits a fantasy about stasis, an imaginary world in which we can trust that whatever happened yesterday will keep happening tomorrow. It's been pretty to think so, but it's never been so. In literary studies, we name this kind of fantasy pastoral. Such a narrative imagines a happy, stable relation between human beings and the nonhuman environment. It seldom rains, mud doesn't clog our panpipes, and our sheep never run away while swains sing beautiful songs to coy shepherdesses. In this sustainable green world, complicated things fit into simple packages, as literary criticism has recognized, from William Empson's “pastoral trick” (115) to Greg Gerrard's “pastoral ecology” (56–58). This green vision provides, in Gerrard's phrase, a “stable, enduring counterpoint to the disruptive energy and change of human societies” (56). That's the dream toward which sustainability entices us. To be sustainable is to persist in time, unchanged in essence if not details. That's not the human experience of the nonhuman world. Remember the feeling of being wet, like King Lear, “to the skin” (Mentz, “Strange Weather”). Changing scale matters, and local variation does not preclude global consistency, but the feeling of the world on our skin is disruptive. Our environment changes constantly, unexpectedly, often painfully.

In december 1968 the journal science published “the tragedy of the commons,” a slender tract by the ecologist and geneticist garrett Hardin that became one of the twentieth century's most influential essays. Hardin's thinking resonated in particular with policy makers at the International Monetary Fund, at the World Bank, and at conservative think tanks and kindred neoliberal institutions advocating so-called trickle-down economics, structural adjustment, austerity measures, government shrinkage, and the privatization of resources. Although Hardin's paramount, Malthusian concern was with “overbreeding,” his general critique of the commons has had a far more lasting impact. He memorably encapsulated that critique in a parable that represented the commons as unprofitable and unsustainable, inimical to both the collective and the individual good.1 According to this brief parable, a herdsman faced with the temptations of a common pasture will instinctively overload it with his livestock. As each greed-driven individual strives to maximize the resource for personal gain, the commons collapses to the detriment of all. Together, Hardin's pithy essay title and succinct parable have helped vindicate a neoliberal rescue narrative, whereby privatization through enclosure, dispossession, and resource capture is deemed necessary for averting tragedy.

After being exiled from nazi germany and completing the extraordinary mimesis in istanbul in 1946, erich auerbach wrote from Princeton University in 1952, “Literary criticism now participates in a practical seminar on world history. … Our philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation.” Auerbach, who must be reckoned one of the great synthesists and literary historians of the twentieth century, was expressing a sentiment that will be familiar to anyone who has thought about world literature from a postcolonial perspective. While postcolonial literary studies may have helped define the parameters of the practical seminar on world history, its full implications are still somewhat obscured by the arguments about periodicity that are often taken as a terminological necessity in applications of the term postcolonial. This is the burden imposed by the temporalizing post-. However, closer scrutiny of the postcolonial suggests that it contains mutually reinforcing periodizing and spatial functions. Many of the most common ideas that circulate in the field, such as colonial encounter, neocolonialism, nationalism and postnationalism, hegemony, transnationalism, diasporas, and globalization, are organized around often unacknowledged spatial motifs. The concept of space that implicitly structures usages of postcolonialism is far from inert: there is an active dimension of spatializing in them that helps shape the field's distinctiveness. This is because even when the term is deployed exclusively for periodizing purposes, as in showing that the medieval period or Russia today is amenable to a postcolonial analysis, the nature of what is highlighted insistently invokes spatial practices. Once the spatial logic of postcolonialism is brought to the foreground, the complexity of its critical diagnostic as applied in the practical seminar on world history becomes clearer.

One of the central tenets of liberal individualism holds that property rights and citizenship rights are based in self-possession, which is often defined as an original ownership of one's own labor potential. In this short essay I propose that the concept of self-possession rests on a prior assumption that selves are possessable objects—an assumption that was generated, before and alongside liberal political theory, in the practice of Atlantic slave capitalism. I will first consider how John Locke formulates the theory of possessive individualism in one of the most-cited passages of his Second Treatise of Government (1690). To shed light on that theory's implications, I will turn to A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of venture, a Native of Africa (1798), which recounts how Venture Smith, an eighteenth-century man enslaved as a child, came to possess himself, quite literally, by purchasing himself. Smith's account illuminates the tacit precondition of Locke's self-possessing individual: to be owned, the self must first be alienated, entered into the market, “thingified.” Juxtaposing Locke and Smith provides a snapshot of a larger project, in which I argue that Enlightenment thought was founded on—not merely proximal to—the Atlantic imperial context out of which it arose.

When we read (analytically or in search of pleasure), we read in the present tense. indeed, the text seems not only present to us but electrically charged. It can seem to envelop us or to be ingested and internalized by us; it can get under our skin, startle us, make us cry, inhibit sleep (Miller, ch. 5 [146–91]). In memory the text may retain much of this experienced vividness and presence, even if our circumstances of reading can only be reconstructed laboriously. The context generally remains secondary to the felt memory of reading as visceral experience.

Few nineteenth-century authors were as prescient as william wordsworth and giovanni verga in grasping what karl marx referred to as capitalism's power to accelerate the “wheel of history” (64). Although neither writer speculated directly on the capitalist system, each manipulated literary form to show how the new free-market ethos affected the lives of workers and, more broadly, the relation between personal and professional identity. Wordsworth's poem “Michael” (1800) and Verga's novel I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree [1881]) explore how a traditional type of labor, shepherding in “Michael” and fishing in I Malavoglia, is transformed by the advent of modern capital. This essay considers how shifts in labor suggest a literary transformation, as elements of genre in each work—the pastoral in Wordsworth's lyric, the epic in Verga's novel—are rendered obsolete by new networks of discourse pegged to modern economic practices.

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.

The classic anthology The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996), edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, was the first of its kind to bring together an array of scholarship that focused on a relatively unrecognized field of study: ecocriticism. This singular publication was the brainchild of Glotfelty, who worked with Fromm to produce a collection that stands at the gates of our contemporary era as a harbinger of the significant criticism and curricula that would shape literary studies in English departments across the country. The Ecocriticism Reader accompanied a new wave of interest in the field as seen in contemporaneous publications such as Karl Kroeber's Ecological Literary Criticism (1994) and Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination (1995).

During its 2008 annual meeting at mla headquarters, the committee on the literatures of people of color in the united states and Canada (CLPC) took up the question of archival work in the study of ethnic literatures. After much discussion of the various ways ethnic literatures are rendered “illiterate” or unreadable, the CLPC proposed a session titled “Practices of the Ethnic Archive” for the 2009 MLA Convention in Philadelphia. That session revealed, and for some of us confirmed, that scholarly discourse on the archive continues, for the most part, to ignore the ethnic archive as distinct from its white, European counterpart. Four of the five essays included here (Carr, Cruz, Kaufman, and Washburn) grew from the conversation the session engendered; the PMLA editorial board invited Nicolás Kanellos, founder and director of the project Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, to participate in the discussion as well. We are grateful to the contributors for their insights about what the ethnic archive reveals and about the unintended consequences of applying to its holdings the theoretical practices informing archival studies writ large.

Formal preoccupations, which is to say specifically literary concerns, appear in small literatures only in a second phase, when an initial stock of literary resources has been accumulated and the first international artists find themselves in a position to challenge the aesthetic assumptions associated with realism and to exploit the revolutionary advances achieved at the Greenwich meridian.

—Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters

“In our country culture has become so complex, this complexity is reflected in our literature. It takes a certain level of education to understand our novelists. The ordinary man cannot understand them …” … And she reeled off a list of authors, smiling smugly. It never occurred to her that these authors had ceased to be of any value whatsoever to their society—or was it really true that an extreme height of culture and the incomprehensible went hand in hand?

—Bessie Head, A Question of Power (first ellipsis in orig.)

ON WHAT BASIS ARE SELECT TRADITIONS OF LITERARY INTERNATIONALISM RECOGNIZED AS WORLD LITERATURE AND OTHERS DEEMED MERELY historical, relics of nostalgic Marxism or of resolved debates on aesthetics and politics? According to recent influential formulations, world literature is writing that in original or translated form circulates outside the author's country of origin. But what of traditions of literary internationalism, like those of working-class writing, that reverse and displace practical, utilitarian propositions to ask, instead, in more abstract terms, what is the use value of the literary? Bessie Head's A Question of Power poses a challenge to practical definitions. What of literary texts that have global currency but aren't of “any value whatsoever to their society”?