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 issue of CR originated in two events organized by the International Critical Concepts Working Group held in Mexico City at the Centro Horizontal in July 2019. The first was a small, one-day workshop devoted to the Mexican crime novel; the second was a larger, three-day event devoted to violence. We thank the participants in these two events for their contributions—intellectual and social—to those two events as well as for allowing us to publish their papers here. We also thank Guillermo Osorno, who for the second time allowed us to hold the workshops at the Centro Horizontal in the zona rosa.