We have no Adequate Lexicon for dealing with the transformation of racial orders. Recently, commentators have sought to pinpoint a shift in racial meanings by announcing the advent of a “postidentity,” “postracial,” or “cosmopolitan” social order. These appellations suggest that we are now past racial or identity politics in some crucial way. But it is not so much that we have gone beyond race as that race has gone beyond us, morphing at a speed with which academic expertise has not kept pace. The content of racial, gender, and sexual identities has been significantly transformed, and this change has, in turn, fostered the illusion that we no longer inhabit racialized realities—hence the proliferation of posts to tell us that temporally and politically we are no longer where we were. The representational strain of dealing with the elusive and dynamic qualities of racial and sexual identities makes us too eager to declare that we are over difference. The recourse to posts seems, however, more an admission of helplessness at identifying the nature of the shift than a sign of transcendence. It stems from our dependence on social schemas that offer us only two options: we are in the racial order or we are out of it. But we are not out of it, not yet. And herein lies a rare opening for the humanistic study of race.

While sociologists generally do not deign to assume such a rhetorical mantle, Michael Omi and Howard Winant Suffuse the first edition of Racial Formation with the language of prophecy that they at once fear to articulate and hope to imagine otherwise. “What does the immediate future hold?” they anxiously wonder.

The line between a contact zone and a comfort zone is a thin one. I can imagine that line drawn in many ways, but the color line of which W. E. B. DuBois spoke is the one that concerns Michael Omi and Howard Winant. In Racial Formation in the United States, when they declare that “race has no fixed meaning” (71), they mean that this color line is always being redrawn, by different hands and differing hearts. It is this possibility of racial transformation, not just racial formation, that makes Omi and Winant's theory powerful and compelling. With transformation in mind, we can conceive of racial formation as another version of Mary Louise Pratt's contact zone, where friction sparks unpredictable futures and where, by implication, our racial present may not look like our racial past. At the same time, racial formation is also reformation, affirming identities with which we feel at ease. In these comfort zones of inherited identities, we encourage others and are encouraged ourselves to toe the (color) line. These racial tendencies, toward change and constancy, innovation and cliché, are evident in both politics and culture. Although Omi and Winant's sociology of race is not concerned with literature, their insightful model of racial formation is manifest in literary culture, in aesthetic form and in literary institutions: the publishing industry, the literary marketplace, and the department of literature, where racial politics are always present.

Our concept of racial formation was advanced in 1986 as a critique of prevailing notions of race in the social sciences. We challenged approaches that treated race as epiphenomenal to supposedly more fundamental axes of stratification and difference: ethnicity, class, and nation. But we were disappointed—depressed, in fact—by the reception our analysis received. Some years would pass before our approach was seriously taken up by sociologists, political scientists, and other social science scholars. What kept our spirits buoyed during this period was the surprising discovery that our work was resonating with scholars in other disciplines, most notably in history, law, and literary studies. We learned much and greatly profited from these newfound colleagues' engagement with our work, from the ways they creatively extended our concept of racial formation, and from their advancement of new ways to think about the ongoing evolution of racism and its multiple dimensions.

In The unbearable lightness of being, Milan Kundera, a writer in diaspora, puts Sabina, a painter in diaspora, in the position of the artist facing the imposition of a ready-made identity. Kundera writes:

Who would want to read an essay titled “Writing Christianity”? “Writing Judaism” might by now sound a bit dated, given that Jewish subject matter is the domain of some of this country's greatest novelists and poets. “Writing Buddhism” still has an appealing ring to it. “Writing Islam” as a topic would not sound interesting to most Muslim authors in Muslim societies. In fact, “Writing Islam” could sound like a fundamentalist ploy to corrupt the thoroughly secular world of literature in contemporary Muslim societies. A more appealing angle might be to focus on writing Islam in the West, or on the global stage, where a growing body of Muslim literature written in European languages is emerging. The authors of this body of literature are outside two folds: Western literature per se and the literatures of their Muslim societies of origin. How do Muslim authors, specifically poets, fashion a voice when they are writing mostly to outsiders? What subject matter will they treat and in what manner? This essay explores these questions by examining how writing Islam is exercised differently by three American Muslim poets, Mohja Kahf, Daniel Moore, and the late Agha Shahid Ali.

So now the pictures will continue to “assault” us—as many Americans are bound to feel. Will people get used to them? Some Americans are already saying that they have seen “enough.”

When The ABU Ghraib Prison torture scandal began to circulate throughout The MASS media in Spring 2004, most pundits and commentators neglected to note how those images hauntingly paralleled the 9/11 attacks, insofar as each event's widespread publicity—replayed and reposted images of physical and psychological destruction—participated in the very unmaking that the perpetrators intended. In other words, just as the terrorist act on the Twin Towers was an act of both material and symbolic destruction that required media representation of the planes hitting the towers, mass media's recirculation of visual images of naked and dominated Iraqi men completed the act that Charles Graner and other United States military police had begun. Though the disturbing video representation of the 9/11 attacks rapidly disappeared from television, the Abu Ghraib photos persisted far longer (see York). The rapid disappearance of video of the planes striking the buildings suggests its traumatic power for Americans. But why would the Abu Ghraib photos be less disturbing than those of the attacks of September 11, 2001—given what they say about United States conduct in the war? In this essay, I consider the Abu Ghraib effect in the wider context of imperial imaging of the other. Second, I analyze artistic and literary responses (including Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib paintings, Daniel Heyman's etchings, and an anthology of poems on torture) that attempt to re-present Abu Ghraib and make visible the invisible of that torture. Third, I sketch out how Arab American poets have played (and can continue to play) a critical role in the conversation about the effects of United States policies in the Middle East. Finally, I share my own poetic project, a long poem called “–u –r—” that attempts to make audible the muted voices of the tortured Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.

In the early quatrains of “Rubaiyat,” a poem in Lawrence Joseph's fourth book, into it, The poet adopts a curious perspective for an American poet of Arab ancestry who is intensely critical of American military aggression. Taking on the “eye” of the aggressor, he pulls up the “satellite image of a major / military target, a 3-D journey / into a landscape of hills and valleys.” He follows the lens as it zooms closer to the ground:

This essay consists of three beginnings, then a deferred reading of a novel. One beginning, a theoretical beginning, reflects on the question implicit in my title: What is unstated in the state of Lebanon? Another beginning, a literary critical beginning, returns to the work of Kahlil Gibran, the most famous early-twentieth-century Arab North American writer. Gibran links modernist and postmodernist Arab North American writing and, in a historical parallel, connects the foundations of the Lebanese state under French colonial rule to its disintegration in the context of the civil war. A third beginning, a contextual beginning, evokes more recent events in Lebanon through a discussion of the July War of 2006, during which Israel bombed the country for over a month. These three points of departure, I suggest, are crucial to readings of contemporary Arab North American fiction, which is always conditioned by theories of the state, a post-Gibran literary sensibility, and the politics of the present. More specifically, I argue that Rawi Hage's representation of the civil war in Lebanon in DeNiro's Game negotiates the destruction of the Lebanese state through figures of the unstated, whose very existence questions more generally the state form as the preeminent site of political authority and contributes to unstating the state.

Why do we call certain attitudes, both individual and collective, racist? Why do we list certain discourses—admittedly a very wide range of discourses, which single out, stigmatize, threaten, or discriminate against various human and social groups—as racist? Why do we consider that practices, both spontaneous and institutional, unofficial and officially organized, that in the past and present have resulted in lasting forms of oppression, persistent hostilities and misunderstanding, and sometimes tragic violence in all sorts of societies are racist? To my surprise, this basic and preliminary question is seldom addressed in the huge scholarly and popular literature concerning racism—the old and new forms of racism, the modernity or antiquity of racism, the quantitative and qualitative variations of racism, and so on. Or, better said, the question is addressed only partially and indirectly: the category itself is taken for granted, all the more because the study of racism has become an essential sociological and political object, and what are mainly discussed are different definitions and theories and the conditions of their application. It seems that the very fact that there exists (and has long existed) something called racism, which includes a variety of manifestations, is subject to transformations, and does not purely and simply coincide with violence, not even violence based on collective hatred, need not be questioned. But isn't it necessary to discuss the reasons that we consider this fact obvious?

“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.

“Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me.

“Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.

“Mama, see the Negro! I am frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.

—Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness” (111–12)

Far back as one may go into the past, from the northern Sudanese to the southern Bantu, the African has always and everywhere presented a concept of the world which is diametrically opposed to the traditional philosophy of Europe.

—Leopold Sedar Senghor, “Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century” (30)

Sango's history is not the history of primal becoming but of racial origin, which is historically dated.

—Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (9)

These four epigraphs give a sense of the diversity of usages of the category of race in Africa and the discourses and practices that coalesce around these usages. I use the textual fragments to open up questions about race in Africa, to explore the various discursive economies in which race is articulated and circulates, and the registers and vocabularies in which responses to it have been conducted. The approach adopted is therefore metonymic: each fragment represents a larger body of texts and practices that broadly constitute a discourse defined by a set of shared characteristics. My purpose is not to discuss exhaustively these characteristics but rather to draw rough distinctions among the conditions that govern their articulation and circulation. In this way I can indicate the network of social, historical, and discursive relations in which the idea of race functions.

In the vigorous debate over Kara Walker's art—in particular, her life-size, black-on-white depictions of psychosexual fantasies seeded by American slavery—much attention has been paid to the objections raised by African American artists belonging to a generation older than Walker's. These older artists, including Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, and Howardena Pindell, as well as commentators like Juliette Bowles, are often highlighted as Walker's main detractors, rendering the attack on her work a form of internecine, intergenerational warfare in African American intellectual and cultural life. This articulation of the debate obscures the extent to which themes and figures in Walker's oeuvre link it to the work of numerous African American women whose writing began to appear in the early 1970s. Walker is connected to literary counterparts like Gayl Jones, Carolivia Herron, Alice Randall, and Octavia Butler through her construction of characters marked by their sexual involvement with the master class. How these characters manage a set of exploitative relationships—in other words, how they explore their sexualities in the context of coercion—establishes them as a literary and visual sisterhood. Because Walker's silhouettes and other creations have been exhibited to large, integrated audiences in some of the most august international and domestic museums, they have provoked more comment and wider protests than the novels of contemporary African American women writers, but the differences in cultural reception mask the deep similarity between these bodies of work.

Remember cyber? surely one of the most irritating and ubiquitous prefixes of the nineties, cyber quickly became attached to all kinds of products (the Sony Cybershot camera), labor styles (cybercommuting), and communicative practices (cyberspace) that have now become so normalized as already digital that the prefix has dropped out of the language. Photography, work, and social discourse no longer need be flagged as cyber since we can more or less assume that in postindustrial, informationalized societies they usually are. Cyber migrated widely during the nineties, but the legal scholar Jerry Kang's article “Cyber-race,” which appeared in the Harvard Law Review in 2000, was the first to attach this prefix to race. Kang answers the question “can cyberspace change the very way that race structures our daily lives?” with an affirmative: “race and racism are already in cyberspace.” He then proposes three potential “design strategies” for lawmakers to deal with the problem of race and racism in cyberspace: the abolitionist approach, in which users take advantage of the Internet's anonymity as a means of preventing racism by hiding race; the integrationist approach, in which race is made visible in online social discourse; and the most radical one, the transmutation approach. Strategies for transmuting race in cyberspace reprise some of the discourse about identity and performativity that was often associated with Judith Butler—“it seeks racial pseudonymity, or cyber-passing, in order to disrupt the very notion of racial categories. By adopting multiple racialized identities in cyberspace, identities may slowly dissolve the one-to-one relationship between identity and the physical body” (1206).

For me, entering this profession involved the broader context of native american and indigenous studies as well as native American literary studies. My scholarship, pedagogy, and professional connections have relied on a synergy between texts as Native authors have crafted them and the social, political, and experiential contexts from which those authors and their texts emerged. Though plenty of work in Native literary studies does not draw on the broader field of Native studies, my own approach has most often placed me firmly in the overlapping space between the two.

In his now classic essay of race discourse analysis, “race under representation,” David Lloyd observes that “the discourse of race … undergoes a crucial shift in the late eighteenth century from a system of arbitrary marks to the ascription of natural signs” (69). The consequent fetishistic obsession with phenotype and somatology holds hegemonic sway over discourses of racial difference from that moment up to the early 1900s and the 1920s, when anthropological relativism and the cultural pluralism of Horace Kallen and Robert Park (of the Chicago school) eclipse nineteenth-century biological racism, at least in the United States.

In her book Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination, avery gordon writes that “to study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it”—the experiential realities of social and political life that have been systematically hidden or erased. To confront the ghostly aspects of social life is to tell ghost stories: to pay attention to what modern history has rendered ghostly and to write into being the seething presence of the things that appear to be not there (Gordon 7–8). By most accounts, Vietnam was the site of one of the most brutal and destructive of the wars between Western imperial powers and the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Yet public discussions and commemorations of the Vietnam War in the United States often skip over this devastating history, thereby ignoring the war's costs borne by the Vietnamese—the lifelong costs that turn the 1975 “fall of Saigon” and the exodus from Vietnam into “the endings that are not over” (Gordon 195). Without creating an opening for a Vietnamese perspective of the war, these public deliberations refuse to remember Vietnam as a historical site, Vietnamese people as genuine subjects, and the Vietnam War as having any kind of integrity of its own (Desser).

Americans have grown up with the idea of race. Race, we are taught, is real because skin color, facial features, and other bodily attributes mark a person definitively as a member of a particular race. This claim is made despite the often astonishing physical differences among people said to belong to the same race or the necessarily arbitrary line drawn between races when the visibility test fails to produce any differences (thus allowing for the possibility of “passing”).

In his essay titled “Drawing Blood” for Harper's magazine in June 2006, written as a response to the Muhammad cartoon affair, Art Spiegelman argued convincingly that a cartoon is, first and foremost, a cartoon. It sounds straightforward, but is it really? Following Spiegelman, we can define caricatures as charged or loaded images that compress ideas into memorable icons, namely clichés. A cartoon must have a point, and a good cartoon can change our perspective on the ruling order. Spiegelman opens his discussion with classical caricatures such as Honoré Daumier's 1831 depiction of King Louis-Philippe as Gargantua and George Grosz's 1926 attack on the “Pillars of Society” (“Stützen der Gesellschaft”) as beer-drinking, pamphlet-reading, swastika-wearing men without brains. Spiegelman acknowledges these cartoonists as “masters of insult,” who often had to face trial or imprisonment for their transgressions (45). The question is whether the twelve cartoons of Muhammad, published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on 30 September 2005, are in any way compatible with the great tradition of caricature.

Initiated in think tanks following world war II, neoliberalism took hold of political imaginaries in the late 1970s and the 1980s as capitalist enterprises vigorously sought to expand their market reach in the face of structural challenges and adjustments, economic and political. Technologies of travel, communication, and information flows became speedier and more sophisticated, further shrinking distances and compressing time. Associated regimes of population management and rule accordingly were pressed into forging novel strategies.