Ten years ago, in the introduction to his edited collection The Future of the Book, Geoffrey Nunberg predicted, “If we take the book in its broad sense to refer simply to bound, printed volumes, then most books will likely disappear soon.” Imagining the prospect of electronic books, of devices that would present text not just on a screen but on something “almost the equivalent of paper in [its] weight and flexibility,” Nunberg looked forward to a time when printed pages would no longer be the primary bearer of textual information (12). That time has not come. The e-book never seemed to make it, either as a viable technology or as an attractive commercial product. More bound and printed volumes are being made and sold than ever. And the history of the book as an academic discipline continues to grow—not out of a sense that books are history (in the colloquial sense of that phrase) but out of a conviction that they are here to stay and that to know their future we should know their past.

In July 1927, Virginia Woolf participated in the first of three broadcasts she presented on the BBC. “Are too many Books Written and Published?” was a collaborative project, scripted jointly with her husband, Leonard Woolf, in the typical BBC format of the conversational debate. Virginia was not entirely comfortable in front of a radio microphone, feeling as she did the constrictions of prescribed time limits, the BBC's conventional respectability, and even the sound of her own voice. Yet she engaged in this program with a liveliness, a good humor, and an inventiveness that display her public persona at its best.

Contemporary liberal assertions equate illegal oppression and practices of expulsion from the juridical order with exclusion from humanity. It is often argued that violence ensuing from the abandonment of persons beyond the pale of the law not only violates their humanity but also, and perhaps more crucially dehumanizes them or constitutes them as less than human. While the objective of these critical assertions is to expose the radical evil that illegal violence can institute, they also establish an equation between the protection of the law and the constitution of humanity, effectively granting the former a magical power to endow the latter. Moreover, these critical assertions reproduce a particular conviction that humanity is a status to be recognized and conferred, or seized and taken away. Rather than leave this relation between humanity and the law intact, by pointing to its political instrumentality in contemporary human rights campaigns, this paper examines what this relation does to politics and to subjects of violence beyond its instrumental use directed at highlighting the suffering of subjects (by employing a dehumanization rhetoric) and at insisting on human-rights-based remedies to combat it. The paper asks the following questions. First, what conceptual and theoretical assumptions about humanity and the law, as well as about the relation between them, make possible the dehumanization argument? Second, to what degree has the law's conception of humanity as a status moved beyond the juridical field, leading many humanist practitioners to assert, albeit critically, that certain groups and individuals are dehumanized? And, finally, what other ways of being human are foreclosed by the conceptual assumptions grounding the law-based humanity argument?

Over the past two centuries, countless writers in the United States and abroad have adopted noms de plume to exploit the literary marketplace. By definition a name either legally owned by another person or fictitiously derived, a pseudonym “conceal[s] some essential fact[s]” about an author's personal identity that contradict expectations held by publishers, editors, other writers, or public readers (Popkin 343). Those concealed facts tend to be the author's actual name and its locus of associations, including gender, family, class, nationality, and racial identity.

Globalization touches the core of what it means to be human. The proliferation of discourses on human rights after the end of the cold war indicates that globalization raises the deepest anxieties about the continuing preservation of our humanity. Because the humanities does not take the humanity of the human being as a given but sets as its basic task the inquiry of how humanity is constituted, it can help us assess whether the vicissitudes of globalization compel a radical rethinking of what it means to be human. If social-scientific solutions to the problems of globalization have always precomprehended an idea of humanity as the bearer of dignity, freedom, sociability, and culture as the power of transcending contingent limitations, and therefore the idea of humanity as an ideal project that needs to be actualized, the task and challenge of the humanities today may be to question this precomprehension of the human and even, somewhat perversely, to give it up.

In his now famous address on the meaning of the Fourth of July to the slave, Frederick Douglass seeks to delineate the various ways in which the persistence of slavery in a nation that was founded on the virtues of freedom, liberty, and equality produces a national ideology traversed by ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions. Suggesting that the experience of freedom cannot be thought apart from that of slavery, that abstract equality can only be imagined alongside the story of black subjection, he argues that these inconsistencies have two consequences. They derail the course of American democracy, and they leave their most painful and material consequences on the lives and bodies of the slaves without whom the narratives of freedom and equality could never be written. This is why he often refers to the violence, inequality, economic oppression, and racist exclusions that have harmed and devastated so many human beings in the history of America and the history of the world. For Douglass, America finds itself in mourning the moment slavery exists, populations are removed, dispossessed, or exterminated, wealth is distributed unequally, acts of discrimination are committed in the name of democracy and freedom, and rights are withheld—and what it mourns is America itself. As he tells us in his Fourth of July oration, this mourning belongs to the long history of efforts to actualize equality, to realize, that is, the promise of the right to representation for everyone, of an America that to this day still does not exist, which is why it must always be mourned. “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary!” he writes. “Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us…. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me… . This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn” (“What to the Slave” 368).

Gloria Anzaldúa's work invites us to reach beyond the usual conventions of academic writing to make visible the relations between self and world, feeling and thinking, personal experience and theory. As a philosopher, I read her for her insights about and analyses of multiple oppression, mixed identities, and alternative epistemologies. But as another Latina trying to write theory, I read her as one dying for thirst chokes on the first gulp of water. Her fearless accounts of violence in the Chicano/a community, her unapologetic disclosures of her spiritual faith, and her belief in the theoretical value of the personal voice emboldened me to reveal parts of myself in my writing that had felt incongruous in the professional discourses of the academy, even in the supposedly anticonventional circles of feminist theory.