Editors' Note

CR: The New Centennial Review is devoted to comparative studies of the Americas. The journal's primary emphasis is on the opening up of the possibilities for a future Americas which does not amount to a mere reiteration of its past. We seek interventions, provocations, and, indeed, insurgencies that release futures for the Americas. In general, CR welcomes work that is inflected, informed, and driven by theoretical and philosophical concerns at the limits of the potentialities for the Americas.

Such work may be explicitly concerned with the Americas, or it may be broader, global and/or genealogical scholarship with implications for the Americas. CR recognizes that the language of the Americas is translation, and that therefore questions of translation, dialogue, and border crossings (linguistic, cultural, national, and the like) are necessary for rethinking the foundations and limits of the Americas.

For forty-five years, CR has been a journal committed to interdisciplinarity, and we continue to encourage work that goes beyond a simple performance of the strategies of various disciplines and interdisciplines, and that therefore interrogates them.

The papers collected in this second issue of CR's New Series are organized primarily around the question of "Borders/Americas." Some of these papers were presented in draft at the conference on "Borders of the Americas" at SUNY-Buffalo in March 2000. Taken as a whole, these papers instance a theoretically savvy, hemispheric and global Americas studies.

Publication of the final paper, David L. Clark's "Kant's Aliens," signals our interest in work that is not explicitly concerned with the Americas, but whose philosophical and theoretical import has consequences for how we think the relation to the other in the Americas. We believe that Clark's essay is an extraordinary contribution to one of the most important debates in recent years: that concerning the racial, gender, and sexual politics of Enlightenment thought. Important work has been published on this topic by, among others, Emmanuel Eze, Charles Mills, and Gayatri Spivak, and we believe that Clark's essay moves this conversation toward its edge or hinge. We trust that this group of papers demonstrates our generalized concern with theorization in the plural.

CR is currently soliciting work for special issues or special sections on the following topics, among others:

• The "Origins" of Postmodern Cuba
• Re-interrogating Early Modern Americas
• The Question of European Identity and the Fate of the Americas
• Brown/Gratz/Grutter: The Fiftieth Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, and Affirmative Action at the University of Michigan
• Autonomist Marxism in the Americas
• Arab/American: Impossible Solidarities?
• 1968: Chicago, Mexico City, Paris, Prague
• Twenty-First Century Detroit
• The Francophone Exponent: Squaring France, North Africa, the Caribbean, and Quebec