Notes on Contributors

Houston A. Baker Jr. is the Susan Fox and George D. Beischer Professor of English at Duke University. He is the author of numerous essays and books in African American cultural studies. His most recent book is Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism/Re-reading Booker T. (2001).

Paul Boghossian is a professor of philosophy and chairman of the Department of Philosophy at New York University. His research interests are in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and epistemology. He has written on a variety of topics, including color, rule-following, eliminativism, naturalism, self-knowledge, a priori knowledge, analytic truth, realism, and the aesthetics of music. He is currently at work on a book on the notion of objectivity. Some recent publications include "How Are Objective Epistemic Reasons Possible?" in Philosophical Studies; "Inference and Insight" in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research; "On Hearing the Music in the Sound" in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism; and "The Gospel of Relaxation" in the New Republic.

Rey Chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University and the author of a number of books, including Ethics after Idealism: Theory—Culture—Ethnicity—Reading (1998) and The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002). Her publications in English (on literature, film, and cultural politics) have been translated into various Asian and European languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, Spanish, and German.

Ralph Litzinger is an associate professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University. He is the author of Other Chinas: The Yao and the Politics of National Belonging (2000) and is currently doing research on discourses of nature and environmental activism in contemporary China.

Walter D. Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Distinguished Professor and director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University. Among his recent publications are The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonialization (1995) and Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (2000). He also edited Capitalismo y geopolítica del conocimiento: La filosofía de la liberación en el debate intellectual contemporaneo (2001) and recently wrote "Rethinking the Colonial Model," in Rethinking Literary History (2001), edited by Linda Hutcheon and Mario Valdés, as well as a commentary to the English translation of José de Acosta's book Natural and Moral History of the Indies.

Alberto Moreiras is Anne and Robert Bass Professor of Romance Studies and Literature at Duke University. He is the author of Interpretación y diferencia (1991), Tercer espacio: Literatura y duelo en América Latina (1999), and The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (2001). His most recent publication, coedited with Nelly Richard, is Pensar en/la posdictadura. He is the coeditor of the journal Nepantla: Views from South and the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith is Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Duke University and director of its Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory. Her recent publications include Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (1988) and Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (1997). She is currently working on a book about twentieth-century reconceptions of science and cognition.

Kenneth Surin teaches in the Literature Program at Duke University.

Slavoj Zizek, philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen. His recent publications include On Belief (2001), Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (2001), and The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-Theory (2001).