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 that 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 more than fifty 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.

This special issue draws its inspiration from two conferences held in Japan, at Sendai in 2006 and at Tokyo in 2007, under the heading "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Question of Another World," I and II, respectively. In an earlier issue of CR (6:3), some of the papers from the 2006 conference were presented. Drawing inspiration from a keynote paper by John G. Russell for the 2006 conference, included here, along with the retrieval of several unpublished texts by W. E. B. Du Bois on Japan, the essays gathered here each propose distinct views of Japan or matters Japanese—oriented toward the future—within a new sense of the transpacific and global horizon. In both memoriam and in hope, the gathering of this issue is dedicated to those lost and those who have suffered in the wake (the tsunami, and more) of the Great East Japan Earthquake (Higashi Nihon Daishinsai) of March 11, 2011.

We are currently soliciting articles on the following special topics:

• • On Translation

• • Betrayal

• • War and Peace

• • The "British Boom"

• • Psychoanalysis and Race

• • Writing, Violence, and Latin America

• • Law and Violence.