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 of CR marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jacques Derrida's La voix et le phénomène, De la grammatologie, and L'écriture et la différence. With the publication of these three remarkable books, Derrida announced himself as, along with Michel Foucault, the latter half of the twentieth century's most important philosopher. These three texts heralded the beginning—already somewhat belatedly—of what would become known as deconstruction.