Editor's Introduction: Questions of Legibility

The art of Glenn Ligon "explore[s] the mutability of language, meaning, and identity in various forms"; indeed, his work questions "our ability to 'read' the world around us" (Ligon, Interview). In an interview with David Drogin, Ligon explains how he emphasizes the "question of legibility" in his early text paintings using quotations from authors: "[T]he quotes that I was using in those early paintings always had the word 'I' in them, and the titles of the paintings didn't clearly identify as coming from specific authors or specific essays or novels." Ligon's Prisoner of Love #1 (Study) (1992), featured on our cover, demonstrates his use of such quotations. He claims that he wanted to "inhabit" this language, "to take on another person's words as a way of talking about the self," but he also wanted to create "connections" or "collisions" between these quotations and his self, and "confusion about who's speaking." This effort to complicate legibility represents Ligon's "reaction to the mandates around the work of artists-of-color for a certain kind of legibility," his act "of resistance to that easy narrative of identity."

A number of essays in this issue explore the legibility of racial and ethnic identities, but, as is the case with Ligon's work, the authors here also consider related ideas, such as the legibility of cultural citizenship, access to individual and cultural narratives, and how certain kinds of experiences and competencies might be articulated in different forms and genres. Melanie Masterton Sherazi asks how we might make legible the sometimes chaotic and cryptic remnants of an author's archive in "The Posthumous Text and Its Archive: Toward an Ecstatic Reading of Ralph Ellison's Unbound Novel." Examining the documents that produced Ellison's two posthumous works, Juneteenth and Three Days Before the Shooting … The Unfinished Second Novel, Sherazi notes how "the collaborative work of posthumous publication … dispels traditional notions of authorship and ownership." She refers to these works as Ellison's unbound novel, a text whose lengthy forty-year composition, posthumous publication, and large and loosely organized archive "challenge us to transgress the borders of our normative reading practices of 'finished' texts in pursuit of a mobile model of aesthetics and interpretation." Rather than approaching Ellison's project as a failure in its "unfinishedness," Sherazi suggests we attend to its illumination of Ellison's creative process and the ways in which its "excess invites collaborative reading acts."

Colleen Gleeson Eils examines strategies of legibility and illegibility in the context of ethnographic practice in "Narrative Privacy: Evading Ethnographic Surveillance in Fiction by Sherman Alexie, Rigoberto Gonzàlez, and Nam Le." As Eils explains, the work of Alexie, Gonzàlez, and Le reveals how Native American, Mexican American, and Asian American authors "still contend with a legacy of colonial power relations between 'native informants' and their audiences." These authors challenge audience expectations by limiting access to characters' lives and creating what Eils terms "spaces of narrative privacy"; their work draws on "contemporary discourses of privacy and access, terms with increasing relevance in a century marked by the dramatic expansion of the Internet and by post-9/11 surveillance politics." Ultimately, Alexie, Gonzàlez, and Le reveal the problematic nature of "ethnographic imperatives in literature" and encourage us to read current debates about visibility and privacy in the context of colonial histories of power and representation.

Anita Huizar-Hernàndez also takes up questions of power and representation in relation to narratives of statehood in "The Specter of Statehood: Inventing Arizona in Charles D. Poston's Building a State in Apache Land and Marie Clara Zander's 'The Life of an Arizona Pioneer.'" Huizar-Hernàndez explains the hesitation of federal leaders from both political parties to grant statehood to Arizona Territory, mainly due to anxieties about the territory's Mexican and Mexican American population. In an effort to quell concerns about the supposed threat of this population to "US-Anglo hegemony," Arizona's territorial leaders began a "rhetorical whitewashing campaign," insisting that the Mexican population "was quantitatively and qualitatively insignificant and would pose no political, cultural, or economic...