The Spanish-Cuban-American war of 1898 was one of the first wars in history to be filmed. Yet despite its participation in the birth of American cinema, the war disappeared as a subject from the later archives of filmmaking. No major films chronicle the three-month war in Cuba or the subsequent three-year war in the Philippines, although films have been made about virtually every other war in American history. My paper is about that duality, about the formative presence and telling absence of this pivotal war in the history of American film.

This article challenges the interpretive consensus on Anton Shammas's 1986 Hebrew novel Arabesques. A narrow application of theoretical postcolonial constructs (e.g., making the events of 1948 the historical trauma that defines the collective memory of Shammas's narrative) misrepresents the complexity of the text as a whole. Analyzing the limitations of readings based solely on minority-discourse assumptions, the essay offers a counterreading, balancing the postcolonial grid with a postmodernist one. Tracing the novel's screen memories and its most daring (yet well-camouflaged) intertextuality opens up possibilities of representation and redefines the minority-majority relations in the novel. This reading strategy, attentive to the text's “difference from itself,” allows for a nuanced redefinition of the identities constructed in Arabesque and suggests a new explanation for the choice of Hebrew as the language for this remembrance of lost Arab time.

Like today's masses, the characters in J. G. Ballard's Crash are fascinated by what Jean Baudrillard calls the accident, especially when it involves the death of a celebrity. Ballard's characters, however, reenact their accidents as sexual rituals of a marriage between technology and death that are beyond the realm of moral judgment, making Crash sci-fi, hypothetical, unrealistic. Calling Crash “the first great novel of the universe of simulation,” Jean Baudrillard has drawn heavy criticism for missing the alleged moral point, both in Crash and in the still-real world. As a fiction writer, Ballard is given a wide moral berth, but when Baudrillard's theory turns sci-fi, the question of ethical boundaries is broached, and leniency is less likely. In defense of Baudrillard, I read him, like Ballard, in the Nietzschean tradition of a purposefully amoral, negative aestheticism, which I argue is of value to ethics and radical politics in a world governed by instrumental simulacra.

Who is, or are, Micheaux's Chesnutt(s)? Which of Charles Chesnutt's post-Reconstruction novels may Oscar Micheaux be said to have adapted in his films? To such seemingly obvious questions, there are some obvious answers. It is well known that Micheaux directed two film versions of Chesnutt's tragic novel of racial passing, The House behind the Cedars (1900): the first, in 1924, is entitled House behind the Cedars and is a faithful adaption that encountered difficulties with the censors; the second is the recently rediscovered Veiled Aristocrats (1932), a remake with a happy ending. It is less well known that around the same time, Micheaux may also have arranged to purchase the rights to Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition (1901), a novel on the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, race “riot,” with a parallel plot on the struggles in an interracial family over the legitimacy of the mulatto side. It is not clear whether the transaction was ever completed or whether the Marrow film was ever made. But together the two novels may be said to map the conflicting contours of and historical changes in representations of racial passing—not only Chesnutt's but also Micheaux's. Both novelist and filmmaker chart the crossing of the classic passing plot of discovery and subsequent acknowledgment or denial of “black blood,” which shapes both Chesnutt's and Micheaux's House behind the Cedars, with narratives of legitimacy—legal, social, and professional—central to Marrow of Tradition. In the process, the novel and the film suggest how the traditional tropes of racial uplift that undergird the search for middle-class respectability, in a kind of updated passing plot, should be thought of as an available narrative form rather than a coherent ideology.

Two works by the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit, El Padre Mío (1989) and El infarto del alma (1994; produced in collaboration with Paz Errázuriz), contain an undeniable testimonial impulse that aligns them with testimonio, a genre of subaltern personal narrative that has emerged with new force in Latin America in recent decades. Yet these texts, which present subjects who are mentally ill, incoherent, or lacking identities, call into question some of the key assumptions about testimonial practice and its reception, disrupting the usual responses of identification with and empathy for the narrator. By reading and writing testimonial discourse through a postmodern aesthetic, Eltit advocates the recognition of testimonial subjects as producers and agents of culture rather than as victims in need of compassion. Her project, with its particular merging of the aesthetic and the ethical, constitutes a local yet politically urgent attempt at rethinking the predominant conceptualizations of marginal culture, refusing the notion that the aesthetic is the exclusive privilege of elite culture.