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 which 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 which goes beyond a simple performance of the strategies of various disciplines and interdisciplines, and which therefore interrogates them.

The papers collected in this first issue of CR's new series are organized around the question of "Cultural Citizenship" Some of these papers were presented in draft at the international Modern Literature Conference at Michigan State University in the fall of 1999. Yet others were solicited from scholars doing related work. We believe that this group of papers demonstrates our generalized concern with theorization in the plural.

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

• Borders/Americas


• 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