During the nine years of his writing career, rudolph fisher published two novels as well as fifteen short stories and won Crisis magazine's Amy Spingarn Prize for fiction. He also published two scientific articles and a much anthologized essay, while writing two plays, a revue (with Langston Hughes), and eight other stories unpublished in his time. Seven of the unpublished stories were collected after his death, but one simply disappeared. In May 1925 Fisher submitted his only copy of “The Shadow of White” to Survey Graphic at the invitation of its editor, Paul Kellogg, whom he had met at that year's Opportunity dinner. Thirteen months after the submission, Kellogg offered eighty dollars for the story and said he hoped to publish it in 1926–27. Yet the story never appeared.

Scholars who conduct ethnic archival research and who use material texts and practices in institutions in order to examine human memory and interpret human meaning-making face the challenge of placing differently archived traces of intellectual genealogies in conversation, conflict, and convergence with Western-oriented intellectual genealogies and methodologies. Such a challenge reveals the question at the heart of the proposition of the “ethnic” archive: how do scholars use archival collections as only part of the larger constellation of inscription systems produced, maintained, and institutionalized by cultural groups no longer beholden to the relational dynamic of “othering”?

Since the publication of simulacres et simulation (1981), Jean Baudrillard's analyses of technologically advanced societies as existing in a state of hyperreality—a condition marked by the alleged inability of our collective consciousness to differentiate reality from the simulation of reality—have inspired both caustic criticism and zealous support. One of Baudrillard's most famous dicta, the assertion that shopping malls, theme parks, and video games have produced “sublimations” of a real without origin or density, suspended in a condition of “hallucinatory resemblance” to itself, generated apocalyptic conclusions: we, postmodern denizens of the hyperreal, have become inept at experiencing and interpreting the world, which has been emptied of meaning (Simulations 23). In Travels in Hyperreality, Umberto Eco mirrored Baudrillard's posture but avoided the caustic pessimism Baudrillard displayed when, for example, he argued that the replicas of settings in the United States at Disneyland are more real than their real-world counterparts, with the consequence that America has become “more and more like Disneyland” (Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory 119). In Europe as well as the United States, we were told that we lived in a world doomed to inertia and entropy, where all distinct hermeneutical systems and stable theories of knowledge had dissolved into a vaporous vacuum without substance and depth.

The dissident priest Richard Wyche, Judged a recalcitrant heretic by the church and condemned to die at the hands of the state, was burned at the stake in London in 1440. Almost four decades earlier, he had been interrogated by ecclesiastical officials in Durham. A record of his ordeal survives, extraordinarily, in the autobiographical narrative translated below.

A brief moment in karen tei yamashita's recent novel i hotel (2010) resurrects a crucial fragment of asian american literary history. Yamashita's book—part send-up and part recounting of actual events—pays homage to and reimagines the multiple paths that were critical to the late-1960s and 1970s Asian American movement. In a small yet important scene, I Hotel highlights how the development of an Asian American literary canon was entwined with the production of heroic masculinity. Three men drive four hundred miles to visit Dorothy Okada, widow of the author John Okada, on a mission of archival recovery and masculinist “heroics” (96). Their adventure begins when one of the men discovers Okada's 1957 novel No-No Boy (now a canonical work) and a letter that mentions the possible existence of an unpublished manuscript by Okada. Ultimately, the trip is unsuccessful. “What happens next,” the narrator tells us, “is history” (97). Confronted by the lack of public interest in Okada's work, Dorothy has burned his papers, and the disappointed men can only ask ridiculously inappropriate questions about the couple's marriage and sexual relationship. In this story, the men who set out to become heroes of Asian American literary studies are thwarted by a woman's failure to preserve the text, and they reduce Dorothy to a supporting role. Yet in recapturing the gendered division at the heart of this defining moment in Asian American literary history, I Hotel also reminds us of other narrative, methodological, and theoretical paths. “As time drags on,” the narrator muses a few pages earlier, “other events step up to the plate, and one begins to wonder why any fork in the road presented the less traveled option” (95).

George Lillo's play the london merchant (1731), one of the most popular tragedies of the eighteenth century, makes the case for the respectability of men who have accumulated wealth through work. Lillo takes every opportunity to display the honor of a London merchant named Thorowgood. In the opening scene, the merchant describes how he persuaded his international colleagues to withhold a loan from Spain, leaving that country unable to attack the English fleet. Thorowgood's action, from which the merchant makes no profit, is unrelated to the plot and serves only to establish his character and patriotism. In another demonstration of his honorable nature, Thorowgood insists that his daughter should marry the man she loves without regard to his fortune or status.

On the one hand, the gift presents itself as a radical Other of the commodity—and therefore also of work, insofar as the latter is understood as an investment of time and energy made in the expectation of wages or profit. On the other hand, the idea of the gift seems constantly to be drawn back under the horizon of rational exchange, and to be thus endlessly re-revealed as a secret ally of both work and the Work.

—Scott Cutler Shershow, The Work and the Gift

I have put together all these details to convince you that this recommendation of mine is something out of the common.

Quae ego omnia collegi, ut intellegeres non vulgarem esse commendationem hanc meam.

—Cicero, Epistulae ad familiares, book 13

LAST FALL I FOUND IN MY OFFICE MAILBOX AN ENVELOPE FROM A SOPHOMORE ENGLISH MAJOR WHO HAD ASKED ME DURING THE SUMMER for a last-minute letter of recommendation for a scholarship competition. The envelope contained a handwritten thank-you note—and a gift certificate for a local restaurant. I e-mailed the student to thank her and to tell her that I couldn't accept the gift certificate since the letter I had written for her was part of my job as a teacher. She insisted; I insisted. She said that several teachers had turned her down before I agreed (from a hotel in Germany) to write for her. I felt rueful, as well as grateful to her for the token of gratitude that I couldn't accept. Eventually she won the debate: I accepted the printed piece of paper and took my daughters out to a free lunch.

Recovering the U.S. hispanic literary heritage is a program that works with an international board of scholars, librarians, and archivists to constitute and make accessible an archive of cultural productions by Hispanic or Latino peoples who have existed since the sixteenth century in the areas that eventually became part of the United States. Founded in 1992 with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and subsequently funded by many other organizations, the project brought together scholars who wanted to make accessible to any interested person, with any level of education, the full range of texts generated by Hispanic peoples and to reform the concept of American nationhood. Depending on available funds, the program underwrites scholarly research, creates virtual and paper archives, microfilms for preservation, digitizes for accessibility, publishes material in conventional and digital form, organizes conferences, and maintains communications with some five thousand associates. The program has found, accessioned, and made accessible tens of thousands of books and documents that were heretofore unknown. It has digitized more than 500,000 items, ranging from published books and newspapers to manuscripts of varying lengths from the first encounters between Hispanic and indigenous peoples in North America to broadsides and photographs from the twentieth century—in short, all the materials that a literate community generates over centuries.

Whenever i have occasion to pause in the course of my chock-full schedule as a professor of english and comparative literature to consider the nature of the work I do beyond research and classroom teaching, journal refereeing is not at the top of my list of things that fill my day or fulfill me. Beyond research and teaching, my efforts in assisting students, friends, and colleagues as they attend to their own research and teaching usually take priority over journal refereeing. I suspect this is true for many of us—except, of course, for journal editors. In the academy, when we scholar-teachers are not doing scholarship and teaching, we are likely shaping the conditions that allow others to do research, teach, and learn.

Many scholars have recently attempted to think critically about the archive, to conceive of it not simply as a neutral repository of information but also as governed by often indiscernible laws and intricate relations of desire and power. Certainly the scholarly products of detailed archival research are themselves the result of complicated archival negotiations, sortings, and withholdings. I wish to focus here on what I will call archival withholding—the attempt to disrupt the transmission function of the archive—in the context of the Western American Jewish archives that I work on; I will leave lingering the question of what, if anything, lends a Jewish, or “ethnic,” specificity to such withholding. The materials at issue—archives and cemeteries related to rural Jewish settlers in the American West in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century—might strike some as incongruous, since Jewish American settlement is generally associated with East Coast urban centers and not with smalltown agricultural America. But in fact the American West is littered with traces of Jewish settlements and (often short-lived) agricultural communities, and a considerable amount of work documents this topic. Just as there were ethnicities of all sorts in the rural American West—Chinese workers and African Americans have certainly been given deserved attention—so there were Jewish settlers.

Native americans have long been the missing subjects of american literature, either excised from narratives of nation through colonial erasure or limited to the discourse of the “vanishing Indian.” Such marginalization is no longer the case, or at least not to the same extent, particularly for literary studies of national, transnational, and hemispheric constructions of race and citizenship. As critics from Vine Deloria to Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Craig Womack have demonstrated, a wide range of indigenous practices and forms of knowledge must be reclaimed within academic forms of inquiry, representation, and circulation. One strategy for Native American literary studies has been to expand notions of text to include winter counts, wampum, and other forms of material culture. Even with a narrower definition of text, however, the current archive of American Indian literature encompasses such diverse works as early songs and oratory, nineteenth-century poems in Ojibwe and English by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, a range of boarding school narratives, contemporary graphic novels, and the amplified (digital) poetry of Brandy Nalani McDougall and Craig Santos Perez.

What work does mentoring do in the academy? to answer this question, we first have to establish what mentoring is. the university of Michigan published a detailed handbook called How to Mentor Graduate Students: A Guide for Faculty, available online. One is expected to read a guide and to perform accordingly. But this guide confronts us with the difference between theory and practice and remains silent on the issue of how much time we spend mentoring.