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.

We thank Tyler Williams for suggesting the idea of this issue to us and for helping to curate it. Additionally, we thank Juan Manuel Garrido of the Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, Chile, for suggesting we translate and include Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s “L’avortement de la littérature.” We are most grateful to Madame Claire Nancy for generously granting to us the rights to translate and publish Lacoue-Labarthe’s text. Finally, we want to thank Mark McGlur for organizing the event featuring Michael Clune and Martin Hägglund at Stanford University’s Center for the Study of the Novel, as well as for his support of publishing both their presentations and the conversation that ensued.