Editor's Column: Intertextualities, Cosmopolitanisms, and Comparative Literature

This issue brings together the best of the scla, with contributors representing long standing members and former officers, junior newcomers to the organization, mid-career newcomers to our conferences, students (some as early in their career as masters students), and junior scholars. No less significant, it shows the extent to which the scla has fostered a diverse membership—senior scholars whose attendance at our conferences serves to mentor younger scholars, young scholars who travel great distances to participate within a constructive ambiance, and students who come to the scla in order to learn how to present a conference paper as well as (at times) bring them to the point of publication. scla conferences are enhanced by regional, national, and international scholars; students, independent scholars, and professors. Although I have had considerable experience in both national and international comparative literature associations, I am always astounded by how the scla serves such a varied population. I began my publishing career with The Comparatist. The editor at that time, John Burt Foster, carefully nursed my initial work into publishable form. I presented one of my first papers at the scla (even though I was based in the North at the time) because it was an environment in which a young scholar could actually receive constructive feedback. It has been a great pleasure to give back to this organization during these last four years. This issue is the last that I will produce as Editor. I wish to take this opportunity to thank the Advisory Board for all the support they have given me during my tenure, and especially for their letters of support for continued funding of this journal during these difficult economic times. It has been a genuine pleasure to work with my book review and managing editors as well as the production team from the University of North Carolina Press.

In addition to its book reviews, this issue includes a series of articles dealing with the interrelated themes of intertextuality and cosmopolitanism. Essays span the cross-cultural and inter-arts influences in Cuban, French, Belgian, Turkish, American, British, Spanish, Russian, and German works. The volume also includes two clusters of conference papers. One cluster, dealing specifically with intertextuality, was organized by scla members and presented at the 2009 acla Conference in New Orleans. The other cluster, in keeping with The Comparatist's commitment to publish graduate students and junior scholars, focuses on the international reception of the work on Edgar Allan Poe. This cluster also originated in a panel presented at the acla 2009. The organizers of these panels introduce these clusters and their contributors in separate introductions.

The issue opens with an article written by Alfred Lopez who examines Jose Martí's reading of Walt Whitman. Lopez brings Martí and Whitman together at Madison Square Theater in 1887, where the Cuban author went to hear the iconic American poet speak on Abraham Lincoln. He juxtaposes the international and interdisciplinary breadth of Martí's learning with the monolingual Whitman as a backdrop for a larger discussion of Martí's posthumous reception as a political and ideological writer, first at the hands of Battista and Castro and later by postcolonial and New American Studies scholars, who tend to view him as anti-nationalist and as a Pan-Caribbean revolutionary—an odd persona, Lopez notes, for Cuba's most famous nationalist revolutionary. Lopez examines the paradox of how Martí admired Whitman, a writer who celebrated what he feared and hated most about America: its status as a rising empire. The author questions whether Martí's praise of Whitman is really the critique of the American poet's imperialistic rhetoric, as many recent scholars claim, or an effort to build a Martí to fit critical agendas.

John Pizer investigates the use of Haiti as a trope in German literature from the early eighteenth century to the present day. He looks specifically at two authors from the former German Democratic Republic: Anna Seghers and Heiner Müller. In Karibische Geschichten and Drei Frauen aus Haiti, Seghers drew a parallel between the suffering of Blacks at the hands of European colonial powers...