With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's revolutionary paradigm encounters its greatest crisis to date. As the state's cultural institutions struggle to cope with severe material limitations and strive to square socialist ideology with world events, Cuban writers increasingly publish their work with foreign companies. Not uncommonly these authors reassert the aesthetic priorities that state institutions are said to have repressed or subordinated to political imperatives. It may appear, superficially, that Cuban writers are out to revive some notion of an autonomous literary art. In situating aesthetic discourse in profoundly dialogic, historically specific, and politically charged narrative contexts, however, these writings challenge traditional universalizing formulations of the aesthetic category. Such historico-narrative rearticulation of social practices and theories of art is prerequisite to a more progressive cultural politics than the socialist state has managed to implement and than an uncritical reengagement with the global market can bring about.

As a way of restaging certain questions about postmodernity (is it marked by rupture or repetition, or is it all illusory?), this essay imagines Fredric Jameson's iconic disorientation at the Bonaventure Hotel as a reenactment of Dante's crisis in the selva oscura. That imaginative act allows one to see how a nonmodern measure makes postmodernism visible (the concept of “cognitive mapping,” for instance, derives from Kevin Lynch's appreciation of the urban fabric of Florence). And it allows one to perceive how Jameson's response to our contemporary condition assumes a Dantean cast, becoming an incorporative act of totalizing, manifest stylistically and conceptually, that deploys allegory to trans-code phenomena into the terms of the dominant system. To what degree does the internalization of such a hermeneutic enterprise (a medieval Christian legacy) render religion as such imperceptible, compelling us to perceive acts committed in the name of Islam as merely a displacement of (proper) politics?

In dialogue with Roland Barthes, whose S/Z unfolds a multiplicity of “voices” in Balzac's “Sarrasine,” this essay focuses on literal voices in the story: those of the castrato and his historical successor, the tenor. It exposes the anachronism whereby a nineteenth-century tenor occupies the place of the baroque castrato hero in the central performance that seduces the title hero, and it analyzes the assumptions that made this anachronism essential to the functioning of the story-and invisible to Balzac, Barthes, and others. By emphasizing the thematics of rivalry and rage in the story and in the political and literary history surrounding it, the essay brings out the oedipal tensions in “Sarrasine” (and, briefly, its companion “L'élixir de longue vie”), tensions that both precipitated the castrato's demise and ensured his survival as a haunting presence in 1830, 1970, and beyond.

Thomas Harriot's A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia has emerged as a paradigmatic “contact” text, in large part thanks to Stephen Greenblatt's canonical interpretation in “Invisible Bullets.” The pair of texts is examined in terms of an implicit codification of the disciplinary tensions between anthropology and history. An alternative reading of an Algonkian ethnography of the English suggests new ways of revisiting the disciplinary rift in colonial studies.

Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plagues is a metafictional novel that comments on literary history. In its three books, Dr. Gregory Revueltas battles a mysterious and ravaging plague, during the 1780s, 1980s, and mid–twenty-first century. In each book he leaves a legacy of writing for the next Gregory to read. By reading and writing this archive, or library of cultural knowledge, the final Gregory develops a historical consciousness that helps him see beyond his episteme's limited science and derive a cure for the recurring plague. His confronting the plague by reading his own writing both intimately and critically is an allegory for the efficacy of literature as a response to historical trauma. Gregory does not gain agency over history, but through the self-conscious reading of his archive he is able to place himself in a cultural trajectory otherwise inaccessible in each book's bracketed historical moment.

The essay reads the authorial hoax surrounding Araki Yasusada, said to be the author of poems relating experiences in post-Hiroshima Japan. The case—Yasusada's poems seem to have been written by a white American man—recalls (not for the first time) the difficulty the literary imagination has in dealing with biographical authorship. After examining the polemics the case generated around poetries of witness, the essay connects Yasusada's imagination to three other ideas: first, the collectively pathological memory associated with historical trauma (exemplified by Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments); second, subject-object relations in modern poetry (the essay closely reads two Yasusada poems in terms of their phenomenological concerns); and, third, a debate around the question of “woman's writing” carried on by Nancy K. Miller and Peggy Kamuf and inspired by another authorial hoax. The essay concludes by thinking about authors as historical objects—objects of readers’ subjective perception of them.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, W. H. Auden and the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, ask themselves, in independent reflections, why attempts to free thought from oppressive schemata result in more-insidious forms of oppression: as clerical establishments go into decline, modernity creates new forms of mythological consciousness. For all three authors, the emergence of fascism in the early part of the twentieth century is proof of this and gives urgency to their inquiries into enlightenment. For all three, Voltaire is a pivotal figure, for his struggle against the unity of apologetic discourse and ruthless power allows them to discern an element of enlightenment that survives the most rigorous critique of its oppressive tendencies. This essay examines Horkheimer and Adorno's fragment “For Voltaire” alongside Auden's poem “Voltaire at Ferney” and shows how the latter both anticipates and reveals the limits of the former.

W. H. Auden's transmutation of homosexual-colonial paradox into discrepant rhetorics of travel is hardly new. Yet the career mobility Auden initiated after his trip to China, culminating in his embrace of an ascetic Christianity after 1943, signals his principled adherence to a negative poetics of transitivity–by which I mean Auden's increasing commitment to writing experience beyond its material context, as well as to the motility of signs unmoored to national-symbolic traditions. This development appears initially in the poet's “Sonnets from China” (1938) as a rejection of colonialism in favor of English literary humanism (inspired by E. M. Forster), subsequently as the rejection of humanism itself in the face of an inscrutable Chinese other unresponsive to English cultural soundings, and finally (after Auden's decision to depart for the United States in 1939) as the transcendence of context altogether.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was one of the foremost texts of the American abolitionist movement, but its impact on politics was international. This article traces the reception of Stowe's novel in Spain, the last European empire with a slave economy, during the mid–nineteenth century. As an imperial power, Spain was the political and economic force behind the transatlantic slave trade; but as a nation of readers, it imported a narrative back across the Atlantic in order to fictionalize and contemplate the effects of its slave policies in the Caribbean. One such adaptation converted the novel into a play about a slave trader and recast Stowe's story of slavery in the Atlantic world in terms of Spain's role in the slave trade and in the imperial control of Cuba.

This essay examines the correlation between lyric obscurity and lyric communicability—that is, the capacity of lyric poetry to serve, even in the absence of understanding (for certain communities of readers), as a matrix of social and cultural cohesion. The essay takes up this question by examining the contours of a little-known vernacular tradition in poetry and by considering the correspondences, in a limited sense, between slang and poetry. Specifically, the essay examines the permutations of the so-called canting tradition (lyrics written in the jargon of the criminal underworld) and its relation to the dominant poetic tradition.

The question of how poetry and theory intersect drew forty or so people to a session at the MLA annual meeting in San Diego on 29 December 2003. Bruce R. Smith, the convener, had asked three practicing poets who also write criticism (David Gewanter, Roberta Hill, and Mark McMorris) and a specialist in technocultural studies (Douglas Kahn) to join him in each choosing a single poem and using it as a test case for discussing how theory and poetry are related. David Gewanter chose Czeslaw Milosz's “Incantation”; Roberta Hill, Edward Brathwaite's “Negus”; Douglas Kahn, Allen Ginsberg's “Laughing Gas” and “Ether”; Mark McMorris, two passages from Aimé Césaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land; and Bruce Smith, Thomas Nashe's song “Spring.” After the five presentations, several members of the audience joined the discussion. Here are excerpts from the proceedings. Short biographies of the speakers can be found at the end.

Woven through the threads of the poetry, performance, and visual art of Cecilia Vicuña are the image and metaphor of weaving itself, a visual and cultural reminder of an other—indigenous and feminine—form of forging cultural memory. Ever committed to using the aesthetic both to remember the violent exclusions of history and to explore the perpetuation and transformation of the marginalizing structures of power in the present, Vicuña's multigenre work spans over thirty years of Chile's turbulent history of struggle with dictatorship and toward democracy. This essay analyzes the interlacing of textile and text in quipoem, a collection of the poetry and visual art of this author-artist that re-presents a constantly evolving theorization of the complex relation between aesthetics and politics, writing and difference, and memory and power in the postcolonial, postdictatorship context of the Americas in the age of neoliberal globalization.

This paper examines the ways in which the idea of renaissance was understood and appropriated by Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century. My discussion foregrounds Hu Shi, one of the most important intellectual leaders in modern China and the main architect of the Chinese vernacular movement. I analyze his rewriting and reinvention of the European Renaissance as well as his declaration and presentation of the Chinese Renaissance in various contexts. Hu's creative uses of the Italian Renaissance and passionate claims for a Chinese Renaissance reveal the performative magic of the word renaissance and prompt us to ask what a renaissance is. The Chinese Renaissance and the fact that various non-European countries have declared and promoted their own renaissances invite a scholarly reconsideration of “renaissance” as a trans-cultural phenomenon rather than as a critical category originated and therefore owned by a certain culture.

In 1614 Lope de Vega, recently ordained, published the Rimas sacras, a confessional canzoniere replete with allusions to his past promiscuity and recent religious conversion. I argue that Lope addressed his collection not only to a public of anonymous readers but also to a specific, private reader: his patron, the duke of Sessa. For the previous eight years, Lope had served as Sessa's erotic amanuensis, writing love letters and poems for the duke's various mistresses. I propose that the collection as a whole and several sonnets in particular constitute an implicit reproach to Sessa. Through his religious poetry, Lope sought to repudiate his degraded masculine identity as the duke's epistolary pimp (and reputed lover) and affirm his status as a priest who served a more exalted and loving patron. In the Rimas sacras, the discourses of clientage and Petrarchan love are imbricated in the dominant religious discourse, rendering it more available for contestatory practices than is often recognized.