Where We Read Surely Matters as Much as What We Read. As Embodied Readers, How Can it Not? How Can We Not Bring Our experience of our own place in the world to the fictional places in which we also reside? If you are like me, you take pleasure in remembering where you were when you read a particular novel and, in retrospect, how your location infiltrated your reading, never mind how different and distant the fictional place was in which you were simultaneously situated. Sometimes your reading so matches your actual location that you find yourself wondering, like Don Quixote, which is which. This was my experience in Macondo. To be accurate, my Macondo was (and is) Quimbaya, a village in the departamento (department or province) of El Quindío in Colombia, two hundred and fifty kilometers south of Medellín and ninety kilometers south of Manizales, a coffee-growing region on the western slopes of the central Andean cordillera. Quimbaya is named for the indigenous peoples who once occupied the region and produced intricate gold artifacts using the lost-wax method. Macondo and Quimbaya so mirrored each other that when I first read Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) in 1969 in Quimbaya, two years after its publication, I experienced the kind of “delirio hermenéutico” ‘hermeneutic delirium’ to which the Buendías are so often apt—for me, an experience of magical realism avant la lettre. How might I have understood this novel, this world, had I not been living there?

Two decades ago the late doreen massey, a feminist geographer, made a clear, rich, and generative argument about what she referred to as a progressive, or global, sense of place, one that emphasized process, that admitted of multiplicity and heterogeneity while recognizing the power geometries that produced hierarchical difference, and that rejected an insular and bounded sense of place in favor of a relational analysis. In Space, Place, and Gender, Massey based her analysis on a brief example, no more than a few paragraphs long, in which she read her own “pretty ordinary” street, Kilburn High Road, in northwest London (152-54). Her critical vocabulary offered a way of thinking about place that was not self-enclosing but outward-looking: what gives each place its fingerprint, she asserted, is the constellation of global flows, the social relations that overlap in one space—patterns that are always changing.

Since 2001, I Have Been Teaching Courses in Cultural Studies, European and Turkish Literature, Modern Drama, and Gender and sexuality studies at Sabancı University in Istanbul. During my fifteen years of teaching undergraduate and graduate students, the Armenian genocide was a particularly challenging theme to bring into the classroom. Even at Sabancı University, one of the rare liberal universities in Turkey to offer courses that challenge Turkish national myths, most students, including those who graduated from “liberal” high schools, had received a nationalist education and came to college either not knowing anything about the Armenian genocide or denying it altogether. Denial of the Armenian genocide is still pervasive in Turkey; 1915 is identified in history textbooks as the year of the Battle of Gallipoli, the most important Ottoman victory against the British and French naval forces during World War I. For most of the twentieth century and up until 2005, when the seminal Ottoman Armenians Conference opened a public discussion of the topic, silence regarding the deportation and genocide of the Ottoman Armenians prevailed. If denialist myths in Turkey acknowledge the deaths of the Ottoman Armenians, they justify such deaths as “retaliation” for the deaths of Turkish Muslims during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 or equate the massacres of Armenians with Turkish casualties of war from the same period. For instance, Talat Paşa, the mastermind behind the deportations and massacres of roughly one million Armenians in 1915-16, argues in his memoirs that an equal number of Turks were killed by Armenians during World War I and in its aftermath (51-56).

It is of inestimable value to see one's work through the eyes of others. the book that is written is not the one that is read, especially when the readings, like those by the contributors to this cluster, come from different disciplinary perspectives. Whether it is Carina Ray's interpretation of a transnational African cosmopolitanism, Jesse Weaver Shipley's rhythmic repetitions as if of a jazz symphony, Adélékè Adéeko's rememory of other African cities, Anjali Prabhu's detection of autobiographical evasions, Alissa Trotz's invocation of South-South dialogue, or the urban analogs to Accra that Paul Lemos Horta sees in the 1001 Nights, for me each reading of Oxford Street, Accra has been an epiphany.

In Dictee Theresa Cha, a Korean American Writer Who Died Tragically at the Age of Thirty-One, Shows Us How Dwelling in language can lead us to the truth of a radical instability. On the first page, she sets blocks of text in French and English one above the other, spelling out the terms for spacing and punctuation that a child might not understand. The English paragraph reads:

“Contre-jour” is the opening section of the coauthored book tourner les mots: au bord d'un film (2000), by the franco-maghrebian philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Franco-Egyptian filmmaker and poet Safaa Fathy. Tourner les mots is about their experience of film generally and, in particular, about their collaboration on Fathy's 1999 film D'Ailleurs, Derrida, released in an English subtitled version as Derrida's Elsewhere. One meaning of the word tourner in the book's title is “to film.” But the word also shares with the English turn a wide range of meanings and associations, including “to turn,” “to revolve,” “to depend on,” “to shape or form,” “to consider,” and “to trope.” Thus Tourner les mots refers to cinematic practice (le tournage ‘filmmaking,’ ‘the shoot’) and to the relation between cinema and language (les mots ‘words’).

I Have Been Teaching Literatures in English for Over Twenty-Five Years at the Universidad Nacional AutóNoma de México (Unam), Mexico's national university, where I received my undergraduate degree. My formative years were marked, undoubtedly, by the universalist ideal that defines the motto of the university, “Por mi raza hablará el espíritu” (“The spirit will speak on behalf of my race”). I cannot recall whether I was aware of the motto's real meaning, or of its cultural and social implications, but I suppose I took for granted that what I was taught as a student was as much part of a Mexican culture as it was of a “universal” one. Reading English literature at the department of modern languages and literatures in the late 1970s meant that I was exposed to a canonical view of literature shaped as much by The Oxford Anthology of English Literature and by our lecturers' (primarily) aesthetic approach to it as by the idea of “universal” literature conveyed in the textbooks for elementary and secondary education in Mexico. This conviction that as a Mexican I belonged to “Western” civilization greatly diminished when in the early 1980s I traveled to London for graduate studies and was almost shattered by the attitudes I encountered while conducting my doctoral research on the image of Latin America in British fiction. I was often asked whether I had ever seen a car (let alone ridden in one), or if there was electricity in my country, and the ambivalent, mostly negative, view of Latin Americans and Mexicans in what I read (authors like Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, and Aldous Huxley, as well as more than three hundred adventure novels set in the continent) forced me to question the idea that one ought to read literature merely for the enjoyment (and admiration) of it or to analyze it with assumptions that fall roughly in the category of “expressive,” or “mimetic,” criticism, which was common in those days and often took the form of monographic studies, which relied heavily on paraphrase.

As 2016 Draws to a Close, the Most Hotly Debated Topic in Hong Kong is the Controversial Behavior of Two Newly elected legislators of a localist political party during their oath taking at the Legislative Council earlier this year. The proindependence advocates roused anger among mainland Chinese and local Hong Kong officials and citizens alike when they declared allegiance to the “Hong Kong nation” and pronounced “China” in a way that painfully echoed for many the derogatory pronunciation used by the Japanese forces that occupied Hong Kong in World War II. Ironically, in their attempts to lobby for the Hong Kong people's interests and right to self-determination, the legislators were accused of ignoring Hong Kong's history and disrespecting those who had perished during or survived those dark days. Subsequently, China's National People's Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) issued an interpretation of Hong Kong's Basic Law that disqualified the pair from government service and preempted any ruling by a local Hong Kong court. This decision prompted thirteen thousand Hong Kong people to take to the streets in protest against what is widely perceived as the mainland's tightening of control over its special administrative region.

In An Essay Titled “The Future of Criticism,” Edward W. Said Made a Remark That I First Took to Be a Platitude: “Criticism exists only because critics practice it. It is neither an institution nor, strictly speaking, a discipline” (165). On further thought, I began to see the strength of this assertion and the implication that practices cultivate continuity and certain ways of seeing. People are in many ways products of their historical and cultural contexts. For example, while I initially resisted starting my reflections on teaching literature by discussing how I was taught the subject in my early years, I know that my story will be incomplete if I do not at least devote a paragraph or two to that experience.

Landing in Yangon (Formerly Rangoon) in February 2013, Less Than Three Months After President Barack Obama's Historic trip to Myanmar (Burma), I wondered what I would encounter. Serving as the first Fulbright specialist at a Myanmar public university in thirty years forced me to alter my approach to teaching the literature of the United States that appeared during the time Myanmar isolated itself. It also compelled me to reconsider the relations among literature, human rights, and language. Locals who taught literature of the United States and Britain never experienced the “culture wars” of the 1980s and the expansion of the literary canon. Keats was on the syllabus in every undergraduate English course, while African American authors were absent, and some of my students were surprised that Americans no longer enslave Africans.

I Was Born in Spain to a Spanish Mother and a Nigerian Father. I Moved to Nigeria on the Day That I Turned Seven and remained in the country for nine years. The interplay between my cultural liminality and an early aestheticism has determined my experience of literature—first as a precocious reader and later as a teacher and scholar.

My first literary diet, like that of many children, consisted of fairy tales and abridged classics. At primary school in Nigeria, our English textbooks featured passages from African novels to teach reading comprehension. While I found the short storylines interesting, their pedagogical use meant that I did not perceive them as “literature”—a word that I associated with stories to wonder at, get lost in, and daydream about. At the age of nine I graduated to unabridged Dickens novels and Shakespeare plays alongside Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, supplementing my diet with Spanish chivalric romances such as Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo's Amadís de Gaula (1508) and Francisco Vázquez's Palmerín de Oliva (1511). Apart from a sense of intrigue, these two works gave me respite from an unrelenting sense of otherness. They provided vicarious adventure, and their settings reminded me of the Castilian castles that formed part of my early-childhood landscape.

Returning Recently to Teach at My Alma Mater, The University of Cape Town, I Was Amazed to Find That the Undergraduate curriculum to which I had been exposed at the dawn of the post-apartheid era remained substantially unaltered. With the exception of an experimentally convened introductory year that reverses chronology with interesting effects, the English major continues to plot a literary history across four inherited periods: Shakespeare and Co., Romance to Realism, Modernism, and Contemporary Literature, which collapses a previous bifurcation of the capstone course into Postmodernism or Postcolonialism.