What is the location of Jewish identity? Cultural studies has provoked reexaminations of many long-standing tropes of ethnic and religious identity, including that of exile. Such inquiries have potentially explosive consequences for the already vexed notion of Jewish identity, especially in the context of an American experience. This essay means to trouble the relation between Jewish identity and the problematic marker of exile, within the contexts of cultural and postcolonial theory, drawing on the work of Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers, including Alain Finkielkraut, Daniel Boyarín, and Edward Said. This analysis allows for a sustained consideration of a diasporic poetics—an alternative aesthetic model for imagining community and the attendant terms of belonging. The experimental Yiddish-English bilingual verse of the contemporary poet Irena Klepfisz serves as a paradigmatic example of such a vision that challenges the familiar opposition between home and exile. Yiddish, a notoriously inclusive language and a by-product of the Diaspora, is central to her inquiries into the relation between individual and collective identities and into the role gender plays in the construction of such entities.

Traditionally, criticism on Phillis Wheatley has emphasized her conformity to neoclassic conventions, failing to explore the depth of her commitment to Western culture or her resistance to colonial society. Building on recent studies that have focused on Wheatley's use of double voicing to mediate racial and political issues in her poetry, I examine how Wheatley exploits neoclassic conventions to rage at the limitations she felt prevented her from practicing her vocation fully. Wheatley sought to authorize her poetry in a culture that refused to legitimize her talent and accomplishments. Throughout her oeuvre she insists on her paradoxical identity as an “Afric muse” and stresses the peculiar spiritual and epistemic authority this oxymoronic identity gives her. Wheatley could not condemn her forcible transport to America, despite her abhorrence of slavery. Enlarged as well as oppressed by her society, she experienced a clash of competing ethnic allegiances that for her became a fructifying authenticity.

The Autobiografía of the Cuban slave poet Juan Francisco Manzano is the only Spanish American slave narrative written by a person living in slavery. In this text Manzano recounts his corporal punishments in graphic detail but explicitly veils certain key episodes of abuse. I contend that this veil is a marker of sexual assault and that the Autobiografía bears silent testimony to the rape of male slaves. Manzano, however, was not only a victim of homoerotic violence; in one of his poems, “Un sueño” (“A Dream”), he reconfigures homoerotic desire in a way that tentatively reconstitutes his self-integrity and establishes a bond of reciprocity with his enslaved brother. In Manzano's writing, then, homoeroticism is transformed from an instrument of oppression into an act of resistance that challenges the racist and masculinist violence of the colonial slave system.

Abounding in visual metaphors and situations, Tolstoy's works are permeated with the conviction that it is the nature of truth to be seen. This attitude exemplifies the ocularcentrism that has characterized European thought since the Greeks, though the Tolstoyan corpus also displays some of the tension between ocularcentrism's eastern and western European recensions that obtains in the Russian context. The quintessential visual situation in Tolstoy is emphatically perspectival—despite the attractions of more “Russian” ways of seeing. The scenes constituting that situation work, in a way reminiscent of the camera obscura, to present life in an intellectually and morally apprehensible form by turning it into a planar visual surface. Ultimately Tolstoy's impulse can be linked with the material nature of books, which foster this very kind of experience when the eye is trained on the page, and this linkage has implications for Russian culture as well as for the relation between the verbal and the visual in general.

Each meeting at the convention has been assigned a number, roughly corresponding to the order in which the meetings occur. In these lists, the numbers in parentheses refer to the meeting numbers within the chronological listing in the Program (meetings 1-154 take place on Sunday, 27 Dec.; meetings 155-444 take place on Monday. 28 Dec.; meetings 445-774 take place on Tuesday, 29 Dec.; and meetings 776-888 take place on Wednesday, 30 Dec).

Forums and special events are open to registrants and nonregistrants alike; in addition, because MLA members have asked about the possibility of having undergraduate students attend other, more specialized meetings, the MLA Executive Council voted to select a number of meetings that will be open to the general public (registrants and nonregistrants are welcome to attend). Because of the demand for space, other meetings are not open to nonregistrants.

In the early twentieth century, a period of mass immigration, Jewish assimilation into mainstream American society was largely a theatrical venture. The musical theater, a predominantly Jewish field that portrayed a variety of American experiences, offers powerful illustrations of theatrical strategies of Jewish assimilation. The groundbreaking Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! (1943), created during one of the most anti-Semitic periods in United States history, exemplifies how ethnic outsiders demonized a racial other in an effort to be considered white and thus to be included in the utopian (theatrical) community of America.

The discursive ligature between the Jew and the sexually transgressive is crucially revised in Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Kushner creates a powerful series of metonymies between the queer and the Jew that suggest their affinities but refuse to reify a unitary queer-Jewish identity. The center of this imaginative project is Kushner's Roy Cohn, who both illustrates and transforms the image of the queer Jewish power broker that circulated in American anti-Semitic discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But Cohn's fate in the play suggests that the author's attitude toward Jewishness is conflicted, and the play's turn to Christian imagery confirms the suggestion. To fulfill laudatory political ends, Kushner deploys a typological vision common in American imaginative production and fulfills a pattern of assimilation equally common in American Jewish experience. I conclude by turning to Walter Benjamin, one of Kushner's sources, for a different model of identity formation that might avoid this fate.

The MLA Committee on Professional Employment believes that each modern language department needs to be prepared to justify the mission, size, and composition of its graduate programs. In an academic job market where a large number of PhDs is seeking a small number of tenure-track positions and given the increasing fiscal pressure on institutions, scrutiny of graduate education can be anticipated both from within the institution and from interested parties elsewhere: current and future graduate students, institutional administration and governance bodies, and, in the case of public universities, state boards and legislatures. From a public policy point of view, every PhD granted represents an investment of institutional and public resources, and the burden of proving that the investment is justified rests with the department. For students, the decision to undertake advanced study is a critical life and career choice—one whose “opportunity costs” are high, whose consequences are far-reaching, and whose personal and financial risks a young person especially may find it hard to acknowledge until they become all too palpable. For ethical and economic reasons, then, a department's ability to gain continued support for its graduate programs depends increasingly on its ability to demonstrate that the programs are of an appropriate size and diversity—that they serve graduate students, the institution, the profession, and society well.