Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial thought and historical difference

I am like the needy knife-grinder — I have no story to tell. — Maria Edgeworth I dwell in Possibility — A fairer House than Prose — More numerous of Windows — Superior — for Doors — Emily Dickinson ... the modes of fainting should be all as different as possible and may be made very diverting. — The Girls’ Book of Diversions (ca. (1840) From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women. How unwomanly to discuss it! — Carolyn Kizer

The madwoman in the attic :the woman writer and thenineteenth-century literary imagination

Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science

Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy.

What is non-Newtonian time? No ready answer comes to mind. Its opposite—Newtonian time—hardly fares better. Neither term is idiomatic or even vaguely recognizable because time is rarely qualified by these adjectives, or qualified at all. In more than just a grammatical sense, time seems to come all in one piece, in one flavor. It is an ontological given, a cosmic metric that dictates a fixed sequence of events against a fixed sequence of intervals. It is present everywhere, the same everywhere, independent of anything we do. It carries no descriptive label and has no need to advertise or to repudiate that label. When seen as this uniform background, time is quantifiable. Its measurable segments are exactly the same length, one segment coming after another in a single direction. This unidirectionality means that there is only one way to line up two events, one way to measure the distance between them. Apparently, we need to imagine time in this concrete form—as a sort of measuring rod—to convince ourselves of its absolute existence. One year, one month, one minute— these unit lengths have to be ‘‘real’’ unit lengths, objectively measurable. And as proof of that objective measurement, they have to come already stamped with a serial number. And so we speak of one particular minute as, say, 10:10, followed by the next minute, 10:11, just as we speak of one year as, say, 1965, followed by the next year, 1966. This serial designation puts time completely under the jurisdiction of number. Most of us take this step quite innocently. Without much thought, we refer to a particular year as 1965, because a numerical bias is so

Non-Newtonian Time: Robert Lowell, Roman History, Vietnam War

convention caught my attention right away. I looked up the panelists: a graduate student (Abigail Droge), three junior faculty members (Cynthia Nazarian, Ragini haroor Srinivasan, and Jefrey Wilson), and the veterans Michael Clune, Anna Kornbluh, and Caroline Levine, who presided. Eightthirty Saturday morning wasn’t my favorite time, but I wasn’t going to miss this particular forum on this particular subject. Presentism has long been a bête noire in the academy—condemned openly by historians (above all, Lynn Hunt, in her 2002 presidential address to the American Historical Association), and more quietly but no less ref lexively by literary scholars. Morally complacent and methodologically suspect, presentism names a fallacy that deforms the past in our own image. To be a “presentist” is to allow the concerns of the moment to color all our perceptions. It is to be blithely unaware of historical speciicities, to project our values onto past periods without any regard for the diferent norms then operative. Such narcissism erases the historicity of texts, their conditions of production and reception, ofering instead “records of our present needs and anxieties” (Kastan 17). Here is a term of opprobrium to claim at one’s peril. he MLA panel seemed to have done so on full alert. “Strategic Presentism”— a rif on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s celebrated coinage “strategic essentialism”—recalls her argument that problematic concepts could work for the marginalized within situational limits. Just as in the 1980s a cautiously adopted essentialism allowed minority groups to bracket the nontrivial diferences among themselves and act as a purposeful entity under adverse conditions, so too in 2018 a cautiously adopted presentism might allow humanists to bracket the nontrivial diferences 1 3 3 . 2 ]

Editor’s Column—Historicism, Presentism, Futurism

How many continents are involved in hemispheric studies, and can we necessarily predict which ones? Is “hemispheric” an objective designation, referring to a physical landmass, or is this a construct for the most part, notional and to some extent strategic? If the latter is true, is it possible to use the word variably, as a term differently mapped by different contexts, without necessarily equating it with one axis of alignment, one set of geographical coordinates? Can we think of it simply as a vector—a direction of inquiry—to indicate any research protocol that goes beyond a single nation, that requires more than one continent for an adequate archive?

Wai Chee Dimock

Papers

Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy.

Non-Newtonian Time: Robert Lowell, Roman History, Vietnam War

Editor’s Column—Historicism, Presentism, Futurism

Hemispheric Islam: Continents and Centuries for American Literature

Historicism Old and New@@@European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance@@@Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism