One day in 2012, while a presidential election campaign was in full swing, i wrote a blog post and hit “publish.” the post was pretty niche, I thought—the ninth in a series of posts that I had been tagging “puerility,” all incipient ideas for a future project that would draw on childhood studies, the history of statistics, and poetics. With “puerility,” I sought to describe a ludic epistemological mode that draws its power from its very willingness to disclaim power and embrace provisionality—an ambivalence often figured through, and associated with, boyhood. My previous blogging on puerility had mused over the Google N-gram Viewer and the widespread propensity to describe it as a “fun” “toy,” the foulmouthed parody Twitter account @MayorEmanuel, and Wes Anderson's 2012 film Moonrise Kingdom. The new post was about election predictions and a recent media flap around the statistician Nate Silver.

It's not news, or it shouldn't be, that the academy is structurally hostile to meaningful diversity. the reasons FOR this are numerous, and many of them are represented in Written/ Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure—an anthology I edited that features essays and interviews with academics of color. It includes interviews with Houston Baker, Jr., a past MLA president, and Cheryl Wall, Board of Governors Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English, along with an essay by Wilson Santos, an artist, poet, and adjunct professor. I framed the collection with an introduction that shows how the rhetoric of merit used to deny faculty members of color tenure was once used to deny them employment at predominantly white institutions and a conclusion that explores how social media are reshaping how academics of color cope with institutional racism. It's not work I planned to do, and until I stumbled on bell hooks's writing about marginality in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics during my research for the project, I had mixed feelings about it.

Around the time I realized that I would be spending the better part of my twenties in graduate school, I saw an episode of the Simpsons that had an embarrassingly profound effect on me. The episode's conceit was alluringly simple: What would happen if the city of Springfield was entrusted to its smartest citizens rather than to politicians or bureaucrats? Or, in the blunt diagnosis of Julius Hibbert, a Springfield physician (and one of the city's smartest citizens), “Why do we live in a town where the smartest have no power and the stupidest run everything?” Why couldn't things be different?

To define or describe the middle ages is to take a political stance, wittingly or not. Controversy accompanies any period definition, of course, as recent skirmishes over the early modern, the modern, and modernity attest. But the politics of the Middle Ages has generally gone under the radar of literary and cultural critique, precisely because of the nature of its formation and its relation to the modern. In fact “the Middle Ages” is a colonial category, developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as (primarily western) Europeans worked to legitimize, classify, and make sense of colonial policies, practices, and encounters. The formation of medieval studies as a discipline, vital to the then incipient discipline of history, was also fully integrated with colonial bureaucracy and administration (Frantzen; Biddick; Dagenais and Greer; Ganim; Kabir; Davis; Davis and Altschul; Lampert-Weissig). As a form of temporal spacing, the category of the Middle Ages enabled the thought of Europe's difference from itself, thus making it possible not only to define European nations across time but also to establish a scale of comparison by which to measure others and to deny them coeval status—that is, equal standing as human beings in regard to law, trade, the capacity for self-rule, and so on.

When I was in graduate school ten years ago, we were discouraged from writing book reviews. The professional rationales behind this advice were sound enough: book reviewing, whether for a scholarly journal or a mass-market publication, requires a considerable investment of time and a public statement of position. Neither venture was a risk that budding graduate students could afford: you don't want to make enemies in your field too soon, especially inadvertently, and you don't want to waste precious time forming an opinion before you've proved your entitlement to one, or so our professors' argument ran. We were advised, sensibly enough, to focus on our coursework and our own progress as scholars.

In the birth of theory, Andrew Cole sets out to prove a thesis that is more audacious than it might first seem: “Theory, as we have known it and practiced it for a century or more, finds its origin in Hegel—and Hegel himself finds his theory, his dialectic, in the Middle Ages” (xiii). In the face of the prevailing indifference, if not hostility, to questions of origin, descent, and inheritance in theory today (although Cole's “today” often seems to refer less to the present than to the francophone sixties and the anglophone eighties), we cannot acknowledge Hegel as the real father of theory, let alone understand the effects of theory's unknown paternity. Cole's statement of purpose is clear enough, and whatever ambiguity remains will be quickly dispelled: Hegel, he argues, “begot” theory and is thus “responsible” for it (x, xi). To position Hegel as the begetter or progenitor of theory, who is by virtue of this fact both causally and legally or morally responsible, is important here: it allows Cole to sort through multiple claimants (or suspects) and extend recognition where he feels it is due but has been denied. From this perspective, to complicate notions of origin and “birth” beyond what the title's Nietzschean reference would authorize—that is, to suggest that theory has neither birth nor origin but emerged through an unevenly developed and historically contingent concatenation of multiple causal series—is nothing more than an evasion, another way of saying that theory has many fathers, an absurdity that amounts to saying that theory has no (legitimate) father. Cole proposes to administer a kind of philosophical paternity test and thus to settle the matter once and for all.

I don't do much public writing, but each month I persuade others to do it in my role as the fiction editor in chief of public Books, a twice-monthly online review that I cofounded with Caitlin Zaloom in 2012. On the first and fifteenth of each month, Public Books publishes six to eight essays about books, nonprint works, the media, the arts, and ideas, written mostly by academics but also by journalists, novelists, activists, and artists. In addition to traditional reviews, we publish roundtables, interviews, visual essays, and Public Picks, our annual lists of best books and films.

When Walter Benjamin gave his so-called baroque book its title—Ursprung Des Deutschen trauerspiels (origin of the German Tragic Drama; 1928)—he was clearly in dialogue with Nietzsche's project in Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy; 1872). Indeed, it is the difference between the traditional concept of birth (Geburt) and the Benjaminian notion of origin (Ursprung)—and thus the failure of the mourning play's origin to be a matter of its genesis (Entstehung) in ancient tragedy—that helps us see what Benjamin claims is the difference between the two genres and the way he would have us read the “historical” periods aligned with each (Newman 74). Moreover, precisely because the origin of the Trauerspiel is not a monodirectional birth for Benjamin, his commentary on the complex amalgam of ancient and medieval, Renaissance and baroque, and Lutheran and Catholic ideological forces and aesthetic forms that battle it out in the historical seventeenth-century Silesian dramas that he takes as his subject can be read both as an account of the multiple temporalities that shaped these odd plays and as a reflection on how those same forces traveled forward in time to shape the social, political, and existential concerns of his own, early-twentieth-century German modernity—which of course had helped produce his account of the early modern in the first place (Koepnick; Newman). Benjamin's famous association of his theory of Ursprung with a “Strudel… im Fluss des Werdens” (“eddy in the stream of becoming”) thus helpfully confounds the conventional directionality of Geburt by literally muddying the waters of just where the origin of any period's meaning might lie (226; my trans.).

In 1802 the Franciscan Friary standing in Munich since the late thirteenth century was razed to make room for the national Theater. Many of its books found their way to the state library where, among further spoils swept up in the waves of secularization following the French Revolution, they fed the growth of modern medievalism. Other relics fed other tastes. A profitable brewery remained in the friary's basement, operated now under secular license, while everything else detachable—furniture, copper gutters and plates, lead and iron fittings, window frames, artwork, altars, the tower clock and organ—went to the highest bidder to pay for the theater's troubled construction. Buttresses buckled and pushed through walls. When three workers raising the roof beam fell into a pit, critics divined the hand of God in retaliation for the friary's ruin. Different observers, more favorable perhaps to the cause of art, stressed the workers' survival and took it as a miraculous omen for the theater's future—God's blessing, so to speak, on historical progress. In the short term, it wasn't. In 1823 the theater caught fire and burned to the ground, as onlookers claimed to see in the rising smoke “the face of a monstrous Franciscan.”

I was introduced to the term public intellectual almost twenty years ago when I was an undergraduate in a literary course on African American music taught by the cultural critic Farah Jasmine Griffin. The class conversations began with readings of jazz and hip-hop artists as “organic intellectuals” in the sense developed by Antonio Gramsci. We quickly moved to the debates sparked by Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual (1993) and to the rise of the black public intellectual as demonstrated by the formation by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of an academic “dream team” in African American studies at Harvard, Cornel West's publication of Race Matters (1994), and Robert Boynton's March 1995 article in the Atlantic entitled “The New Intellectuals,” which added Toni Morrison, Stanley Crouch, Patricia Williams, Michael Eric Dyson, Derrick Bell, June Jordan, and many others to that category. By the time I arrived at Harvard in 1999, for graduate study in African American literature, the idea of the black public intellectual served as a backdrop and a blueprint for how my generation of scholars could live inside and beyond the campus walls. As beneficiaries of that era, my peers and I did not necessarily have to prove that our work belonged in the public; instead, we had to wrestle with newer questions of format and forum in the digital age.

Theories, like people, need their fetishes. I'm speaking not of the object fixations of the contemporary humanities but rather of those figures that, while extrinsic to a theory's methodology—even striking a sour or discordant lexical note—come to possess and animate that theory. Such, at least, was true for Marx's Capital, which derives a good deal of its analytic force from the sacramental magnificence of the spirit world. Indeed, the religious language of the fetish—irreducible to the logic of exchange value and the mechanics of equivalence that Capital extrapolates—is the motor of the text. It is so because the language of the fetish lies outside the terms of political economy. The fetish—Capital's indispensable outlier—denaturalizes the banal, violent fungibilities that are the capitalist lifeworld, wreaking its stomach-turning unveilings as if from another planet. Capital would not be Capital without its fetish.

Translation played a central role in the life of Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 1920-95). One of the most iconic figures in twentieth-century Chinese literature, Chang also wrote extensively in English throughout her career, which began in the early 1940s in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. She achieved fame quickly but fell into obscurity after the war ended in 1945. Chang stayed in Shanghai through the 1949 Communist revolution and in 1952 moved to Hong Kong, where she worked as a freelance translator and writer for the United States Information Service and wrote two anti-Communist novels in English and Chinese, The Rice-Sprout Song (1955) and Naked Earth (1956).

Let me start by defining “theory,” because the definition itself illustrates why we can name hegel as its inventor, rather than marx or Nietzsche, both of whom pick up where Hegel left off. As I suggest in The Birth of Theory, Hegel founds theory in his break from Kant, which I regard as the signal moment when philosophy transforms into theory as we now know it. What makes Hegel different from Kant, in other words, is what makes his habits of thought— his dialectic, above all—lasting and familiar and such a part of what goes into critical theorizing today, even within schools of thought that celebrate their anti-Hegelianism or are indifferent to Hegel. In Hegel we find the following three features that I am content to call “theory.”