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 50 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 the global-level perspective that guided the organization and discussion of two conferences held in Japan in 2006 and 2007. The discussion of both events was placed under the heading “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Question of Another World,” 1 and 2, respectively. In two earlier issues of CR (6.3 and 12.1), some of the papers from the 2006 and 2007 conferences were presented. Building its discourse around four papers that were prepared for and subsequently developed further in the wake of the 2007 conference—that is, the essays of Alexander Weheliye, Kevin Thomas Miles, Payal Patel, and Lily Phillips—along with the distinct and original contributions by R. A. Judy, Christopher Powers, Allison Laskey, and Ainsworth Clarke, each working on the thought of W. E. B. Du Bois over some years, even decades, the gathering of work offered here—like the conferences noted above and the previous CR special issues presented in relation to W. E. B. Du Bois’s itinerary—is oriented to the interrelation of the techniques of thought and intellectual production practiced by him—form in the threshold sense of a writing, of the mark, of the grapheme, of the organization of narrative, and the reconstrual of the problem of representation, even to a supposed sense of self—from one end to the other of his long-term itinerary, from the mid-1890s to the early 1960s. Herein, as before, the guiding question for W. E. B. Du Bois that we inhabit in this issue was and remains oriented toward the problem of how to think the future within his fundamental sense, not only of the horizon of a supposed global modernity but in terms of the question of the poetics for thinking beyond its limits toward that which is another world, worlds, those yet to come, for which we might find some affirmation, from within the interstices of both our historical present and our historical future.

We currently are soliciting work for Special Issues and Special Sections on the following topics, among others:

Translation and the Global Humanities

Literature and the Limit

Indigenous Aesthetics

Style

Derrida 1967

Subjectivity

Living with… Marc Crépon

Martin Luther King and Human Rights

Marxism in the Twenty-First Century