In the consolidation of the nation-state, literature has served as one of the most prominent “representational machineries” of national culture (Prasad 72), but claiming that all or most Third World fiction writers articulate the national defeats the most important attribute of literature—its political and aesthetic autonomy. The articles in this cluster all discuss authors who, in Orhan Pamuk's term, do not feel “at home” at home. These authors' literary and philosophical expressions of alienation illustrate the necessity to challenge the universalisms of global literary studies, particularly the way Third World literatures are nationalized. Global literary studies has categorized Third World literatures as enunciations of the national, reserving the moment of emancipatory critique too easily for diasporic, exilic, immigrant, or postcolonial literatures produced in the West, with the underlying assumption that exposure to the West, through a Western language, literary tradition, or audience, is a precondition for critique. Concomitantly, latent in this “modernist conception of exile as a privileged state of consciousness” is the belief that a critique of the national is only possible outside the Third World nation-state (Giles 31). Jale Parla's and Nergis Ertürk's articles illustrate that many of the writers who felt not at home were indeed at home and in Turkey did not leave home to voice their critique of or reluctance to participate in linguistic engineering.

I propose that William Bartram's Travels yields an ecological conception of revolution that alters theorizations of resistance in the eighteenth-century plantation zone. The entanglements that proliferated in the plantation zone disabled taxonomies distinguishing the human from the animal from the vegetable from the atmospheric, giving rise to an awareness of ecology. This ecological orientation departs from an eighteenth-century political and aesthetic tradition distinguishing persons—in particular white colonial subjects—from the objects and terrains they surveyed. In fact, Bartram's increasingly ecological orientation compromised his ability to function as a citizen-subject of print culture. Focusing on Anglo-European travelers and on African resistance, I argue that instead of simply producing subjects who gained power through an abstract and abstracting print culture, the plantation zone witnessed the emergence of agents who gained power from combining with ecological forces.

In the Fall of 2004, members of the MLA committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada felt that it was time to assess the state of the study of race in literary studies as we approached the twenty-year anniversary of the publication of the seminal collection “Race,” Writing, and Difference (1986), edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which contained contributions from some of the most important scholars of race. It may appear that studying race is now largely taken for granted in English departments and that we no longer need to place quotation marks around race to emphasize its constructedness. Many scholars, though, feel a deep sense of anxiety that the situation with regard to race may have been normativized and comfortably compartmentalized but not improved. Intellectual tokenism abounds, as do equivalences between phenotypes and fields of study, with notable exceptions in larger metropolitan universities. For those of us outside English departments, the situation has barely improved. Each discipline has its unique historical baggage, and some are more able to discard their baggage than others, while some have been placed under greater pressure to change. But the truth of the matter is that some are just plain unwilling to acknowledge the significance of race even as they strive to update their disciplines and expand into new areas. In the extensive field of literary studies, it is premature to state that race has arrived, and it is not at all certain that the relation between race and critical theory, so central to the Gates volume, is settled. To a large extent, critical theory continues to see race as exterior to it, transcendent of the theorizations and lived experiences of race. Even though South Asia-based postcolonial theory has geared us to the study of colonialism and its consequent postcolonial complexities, it has also long held a strongly ambivalent relation to race studies.

With little Ottoman and less French, the tragicomic hero of an early Turkish novel, Araba Sevdasι (1896; “The Carriage Affair”), finds himself at a semantic impasse before a line in a French poem that reads, “[K]elime şeyi resmetmeye borçlu ise” (“[I]f the word could represent the thing”). Frustrated, he throws the poem away, grumbling, “[T]ous les poètes sont fous” (“[A]ll poets are fools”). This defiant gesture marks the beginning of the linguistic issue the Turkish novelists confronted during the first century of the Turkish novel (1870–1970). The reformist objective of these novelists was the employment of a vernacular style to appeal to the readership of an emerging print culture. The subsequent nationalist attempts to simplify the Turkish language led, in Geoffrey Lewis's words, to the “catastrophic success” of the “language revolution” of the republican era and had dire consequences for the development of the novel in Turkey.

American literary studies has shown that the symbolic exclusion of Native Americans from the Puritan and early national imaginaries was an essential component of the making of an American identity. This argument builds on reading practices that stress literary-historical contextualization. Our essay considers how M. Night Shyamalan's film The Village (2004) addresses the continuing relevance of Native American exclusion from the national imaginary not by faithfully representing “history” but by layering its narrative with multiple historical registers. Realized through editing, cinematography, and set design, these registers—seventeenth-century Puritan, turn-of-the-twentieth-century utopian, and “the present”—are stage-managed by a group of idealistic elders who wish to protect their community from the evils of the world outside. While most critics have reduced The Village to an allegory of post-9/11 United States political culture, we propose a viewing of the film as parable that marks historical collapses and exclusions as the limits of utopia.

How do we talk about racism, which we must, given its pervasiveness, without erasing significant changes that distinguish the present from the past and, even more important, without contributing to further racialization of the language of social and cultural analysis—and, by implication, to racist discourses? Much has changed over the last half century in the consciousness of racism and in efforts to overcome it. It is obscurantist to overlook these changes and speak of racism today as if it were the racism of earlier times. On the other hand, recent decades have witnessed the globalization of racism, the racialization of social categories, and the proliferation of race talk, which contributes to the reification of race. This article seeks to evaluate the ways in which race talk finds expression in discourses of political economy, labor migration, biogenetics, and neoliberal attacks on the idea of the social, as well as in putatively antiracist arguments in cultural and postcolonial studies that nevertheless contribute to the pervasiveness of race talk. It suggests that contemporary issues of race are best grasped within a condition of global modernity and sees in the restoration of the social a precondition for overcoming political and cultural racialization.

As I was preparing to leave for Chicago, I read the latest PMLA special-topic issue, Remapping Genre, coordinated by Wai Chee Dimock and Bruce Robbins. So, impressed once again by the power of the concept of genre, I begin by remarking the form of what I am doing here tonight. That genre is, of course, something called an MLA presidential address. There have been 116 such addresses since 1883, when forty professors met at Columbia to found the MLA. As the 117th president in this long line, I prepared for this evening by doing a small study of what my predecessors have written for the occasion over more than a century. Such a study, I might add, is very much part of the genre. Certain features of the canon are persistent enough to catch the eye of even the most casual student of the form. The dominant structure of an MLA presidential address is an arrangement that goes back at least to the Sophists: it is an argument arranged as a contest between two antitheses. Over the years, the dichotomies have changed, but the template of binary opposition has remained improbably constant.

Panopticism seeks to make the pysche visible to a top-down system of examination and classification. In the process, it drives out privacy, the right to privacy, and, with them, the right to free self-making. Against this driving out, Etheridge Knight poses a remarkable body of poetry and prose that becomes a kind of antipanopticon in its cultivation of unconstrained communication and communion. During the years he spent as a “guest” of the Indiana State Prison, for instance, Knight wrote for prison and, later, other publications. He sought, even in the prison columns that were his main early outlet, to cultivate a communicative feedback loop capable of providing a channel through which hospitality could reach those who could not recognize themselves in mainstream American discourse. Knight's feedback loop confirms Jacques Derrida's view that “language is hospitality.”

This essay investigates an erotic encounter between the libertine Louisa and Good-natured Dick, foregrounding the way Dick's representation challenges early modern notions of idiocy as a fixed condition and Enlightenment assumptions (articulated in John Locke's Essay) that rationality and linguistic capability underwrite human superiority. Employing disability studies as a frame, it explores how cognitive impairment can serve as a device for elucidating the text's thematic preoccupation with valorizing signs and sensation over language and reason. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's concept of “narrative prosthesis” comes into play as the piece interrogates the passage's sublime rhetoric and allusion to the theriophilic paradox. References to discourses concerning animal soul (René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi), sign language (Johann Conrad Amman), medical understandings of the nerves and sensation (Thomas Willis), and setting species boundaries (Julien de La Mettrie) illustrate that the episode is a locus classicus of anti-Lockean epistemology, one pointing forward to the abbé de Condillac and Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard (originator of special education).

Liberalism is globally triumphant, the dominant political ideology of the modern age. In recent decades, it increasingly has been based on the social contract tradition of John Locke and Immanuel Kant, which has been spectacularly revived by John Rawls's 1971 A Theory of Justice. Debates about the justice or injustice of the existing social order overwhelmingly use a liberal framework, typically centering on the comparative defensibility of social democratic or welfarist conceptions of liberalism versus free market, neoliberal conceptions. But there is a debate orthogonal to these familiar left-right disputes that tends to remain unacknowledged. Liberalism, I suggest, has historically been predominantly a racial liberalism, based on what has in effect been a “racial contract” among whites that denies equal personhood to people of color. White political philosophers have generally ignored this history, but only by recognizing it can we dismantle the structures of white racial privilege established by racial liberalism.