The creation of a new school system in the Philippines in 1898 and educational reforms in occupied Japan, both with stated goals of democratization, speaks to a singular vision of America as savior, following its politics of violence with benevolent recuperation. The pedagogy of recovery-in which schooling was central and natives were forced to accept empire through education-might have shown how Americans could be good occupiers, but it also created projects of Orientalist racial management: Filipinos had to be educated and civilized, while the Japanese had to be reeducated and "de-civilized." In Campaigns of Knowledge, Malini Schueller contrapuntally reads state-sanctioned proclamations, educational agendas, and school textbooks alongside political cartoons, novels, short stories, and films to demonstrate how the U.S. tutelary project was rerouted, appropriated, reinterpreted, and resisted. In doing so, she highlights how schooling was conceived as a process of subjectification, creating particular modes of thought, behaviors, aspirations, and desires that would render the natives docile subjects amenable to American-style colonialism in the Philippines and occupation in Japan.

""Dangerous Professors" is pertinent, well-executed, and apt to introduce new and helpful perspectives regarding the present meaning and value of academic freedom in the U.S. university system and, by extension, U.S. public and civil society generally."
---Adam Green, University of Chicago

Through various examinations of past and current threats to academic freedom, "Dangerous Professors" investigates the status of such freedom in the aftermath of 9/11. Bringing together scholars in literature, law, and American Studies, the collection of essays seeks to understand academic freedom in historical perspective by focusing on the key documents that have defined its current meaning, and then to analyze the ways in which this concept protects but also limits critical voices on campus. Including essays from academics (Ward Churchill and Robert Jensen) who have been directly involved in recent controversies about academic freedom, "Dangerous Professors" provides a timely and critical look at the battle over educational curricula and institutions today.

Malini Johar Schueller is Professor of English at the University of Florida and author of several books and publications, including "U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790-1890" (1998) and the forthcoming "Locating Race: Global Sites of Post-Colonial Citizenship" (2009).

Ashley Dawson is Associate Professor of English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), and at the College of Staten Island, where he specializes in postcolonial studies. He is the author of "Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain" (2007) and coeditor of "Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism" (2007). Professor Dawson is also a member of the Social Text editorial collective.

Cover illustration: Computer Security (c) iStockphoto.com

When exploring the links between America and postcolonialism, scholars tend to think either in terms of contemporary multiculturalism, or of imperialism since 1898. This narrow view has left more than the two prior centuries of colonizing literary and political culture unexamined. Messy Beginnings challenges the idea of early America's immunity from issues of imperialism, that its history is not as ""clean"" as European colonialism. By addressing the literature ranging from the diaries of American women missionaries in the Middle East to the work of Benjamin Franklin and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and through appraisals of key postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, the contributors to this volume explore the applicability of their models to early American culture. Messy Beginnings argues against the simple concept that the colonization of what became the United States was a confrontation between European culture and the ""other."" Contributors examine the formation of America through the messy or unstable negotiations of the idea of ""nation."" The essays forcefully show that the development of ""Americanness"" was a raced and classed phenomenon, achieved through a complex series of violent encounters, legal maneuvers, and political compromises. The complexity of early American colonization, where there was not one coherent ""nation"" to conquer, contradicts the simple label of imperialism used in other lands. The unique approach of Messy Beginnings will reshape both pre-conceived notions of postcolonialism, and how postcolonialists think about the development of the American nation.

This remarkable book, written by former slave David F. Dorr, published in the mid-nineteenth century and only recently rediscovered, is an uncommon travel narrative. In the 1850s Dorr accompanied Louisiana plantation owner Cornelius Fellowes on a tour of the world's major cities, with the promise that when they returned to the United States, Dorr would be given his freedom. When that promise was broken, Dorr escaped to Ohio and wrote of his experiences in "A Colored Man Round the World,"
Malini Johar Schueller has edited and annotated the 1858 text and added a critical introduction that provides a useful context for understanding and appreciating this important but heretofore neglected document. Her edition of "A Colored Man Round the World" provides a fascinating account of Dorr's negotiation of the conflicting roles of slave versus man, taking into account all of the racial complexities that existed at the time. As a traveler abroad, Dorr claimed an American selfhood that allowed him mobility in Europe, and he benefited from the privileges accorded American "Orientalists" venturing in the near East. However, any empowerment that Dorr experienced while a tourist vanished upon his return to America.
The book will be welcomed for the rare perspective it provides of the mid-nineteenth century, through the eyes of an African-American slave and for the light it casts on world and U.S. history as well as on questions of racial and national identity.
Malini Johar Schueller is Professor of English, University of Florida.