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 which therefore interrogates them.

In this, the third issue of our new series, we have assembled papers without an overarching theme. Here we tackle issues of multicultural polity, literary canon formation, race and architecture, postcolonial theory in the Americas, some of the key works in modern border studies, and autonomist Marxism. We have made space for an unusually lengthy contribution from Victor Li regarding the fate of cultural analysis. In its particulars, the piece examines the high-stakes debate during the 1990s between anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere. Professor Obeyesekere's response to this article is included here; Professor Sahlins, we should note, was invited to respond, but declined to comment.

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

• Globalicities: The Possibilities of the "Globe"
• Pan-Americanisms
• Autonomist Marxism in the 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
• 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

Our next issue, New Series 2.1, due in Spring 2002, will focus on "Re-Interrogating Early Modern Americas," and 2.2 will deal with "The 'Origins' of Postmodern Cuba." The latter will include approximately one hundred pages of translated materials from Cuban arts and politics journals from the 1940s and 50s, in addition to scholarly commentary.