Note from the Editor

152 CLA JOURNAL Note from the Editor With this second-born digital issue, the College Language Association Journal proudly takes its place among other major academic periodicals that reap multiple benefitsfromthisalternativeplatform.AsEditor,IamhappytoreportthatCLAJhas just entered a Hosting Agreement with JSTOR with the full support of the CLA Executive Committee. Beginning with issues 61.1-2 and going forward, JSTOR will be responsible for disseminating subsequent issues of the journal and making it accessible to our many institutional subscribers at jstor.org. This agreement with JSTOR to serve as the journal’s hosting platform will assure greater access and wider circulation of our published materials. JSTOR is “a highly selective digital library of academic content in many formats and disciplines. The collections include top peer-reviewed scholarly journals as well as respected literary journals, academic monographs, research reports from trusted institutes, and primary sources.” It provides “full runs of more than 2,600 top scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences”and“works with a diverse group of nearly 1,200 publishers from more than 57 countries to preserve and make their content digitally available.” For more information on this service, go to https://about.jstor. org/whats-in-jstor/. Questions regarding current issue subscriptions to CLAJ may also be directed to px@ithaka.org. As a reminder, CLA members will continue to have easy access to CLAJ through the CLA portal. Joining this league has required an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes work that included doing comparison research on services offered by various digital hosting organizations, holding weekly conference calls with JSTOR officials and CLA Executive Committee members, reading through thick documents, and, finally, entering an agreement with what we determined to be the best hosting venue for CLAJ. Subscribers will also note that the momentum of CLAJ’s publishing schedule was impacted as we worked out terms of a win-win agreement with JSTOR. Now that both organizations have sealed that agreement, we turn our full attention to bringing the journal back in line with its publishing commitment. Of course, this enterprise will not only involve CLAJ’s internal operations. You can also play a role by assuring that we keep a healthy reserve of scholarly articles from which to choose for each new issue. Moving forward, CLAJ will also actively pursue new ideas to continue to engage our many faithful subscribers. The depth, breadth, and quality of the five essays in this issue affirm that CLAJ continues to evolve with excellence! In “Marronage and Re-Creation in Assata,” Dominick Rolle analyzes Assata Shakur’s rich autobiography in which she relates her experiences as a black female soldier in a para-military, black power organization—the Black Liberation Army. While doing so, he explores her arrest and subsequent periods of incarceration by the New Jersey legal system after she CLA JOURNAL 153 Note from the Editor is accused of killing a white police officer on a New Jersey turnpike in 1973. He asserts that Assata represents herself as a female maroon figure to critique the horrendous ways in which the American legal system continues to position black women as property in prison, while she indicts the prison-industrial-complex as orchestrating a system of neo-slavery which entraps people of color across the African Diaspora. Assata’s escape from prison and her subsequent exile in Cuba also suggests the capacity of blacks to fight against this egregious system of confinement through flight and resistance. During the first Red Scare of 1919, the state department’s Bureau of Investigation (BI) hired investigative agents who were trained by Yale University’s Department of English in biographical criticism to surveil the lives and works of African American writers for evidence of radicalism and sedition. Cognizant of such surveillance, Claude McKay fled the U.S. and embarked on a decade-long transatlantic journey to escape surveillance in America. Employing recent work in surveillancestudies,KelseyKiser’sessay,“‘Howcomeyoujustvanishedthatawaylike a spook’: Global Surveillance in the Transatlantic Novels of Claude McKay,”reveals how McKay’s transatlantic plots exposed the state’s shift from local surveillance methods of panoptical physical enclosure to bureaucratized fluid surveillance that tracked expatriated black writers abroad. Kiser asserts that we...