As an acclaimed poet, editor, critic, translator, and educator, Charles Bernstein, in his decades-long commitment to poetry and poetics, criticism, and literary scholarship, reflects a profound understanding of the importance of language to every level of culture-making. Throughout his life, Bernstein has facilitated a vibrant dialogue between discrepant tendencies in poetic traditions and practices, shaping and questioning received ideas to reveal poetry's widest capabilities. This issue includes Bernstein's most informative and significant international interviews, many published here in English for the first time. Through prefaces and essays responding to translations of his work, including translations appearing for the first time in this issue, contributors place Bernstein's work in both global and local contexts. This issue offers a comprehensive representation of Charles Bernstein as a poet of the American tradition whose work has had a profound impact throughout the world. Contributors. Luigi Ballerini, Runa Bandyopadhyay, Charles Bernstein, Paul A. Bove, Dennis Buscher-Ulbrich, Natalia Fedorova, Feng Yi, Jean-Marie Gleize, Susan Howe, Yunte Huang, Pierre Joris, Abigail Lang, Leevi Lehto, Marjorie Perloff, Ian Probstein, Ariel Resnikoff, Brian Stefans, Enrique Winter

This special issue aims to channel the energies, tactics, critical forces, and comparative poetics Masao Miyoshi (1928-2009) carried out in his work from the 1970s on: coming to terms with his concept of aftering (the act of prolonging and transforming impacts across cultural, political, and disciplinary borders) and its temporal, border-crossing, translational, field-reframing, and revisionary effects. Contributors do not assess his scholarship and photography in any memorial, critical, or honorific sense. Instead, they seek to renew the critical visions that he distributed across various fields, from Asian to Asian American studies and beyond. Each takes seriously the mandate inside Miyoshi's work that cultural criticism envision its work broadly and courageously. Essays address the state of Japan studies; China's role in twentieth-century geopolitics, particularly involving Tibet; the critical ethos of "the planetary" in the Anthropocene; and the Korean film Snowpiercer, whose plot represents an embodiment of killer capitalism. Contributors. Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Arif Dirlik, Harry Harootunian, Reginald Jackson, Mary Layoun, Christine L. Marran, George Solt, Keijiro Suga, Stefan Tanaka, Chih-ming Wang, Rob Wilson

For at least two decades the career of Edward Said has defined what it means to be a public intellectual today. Although attacked as a terrorist and derided as a fraud for his work on behalf of his fellow Palestinians, Said's importance extends far beyond his political activism. In this volume a distinguished group of scholars assesses nearly every aspect of Said's work--his contributions to postcolonial theory, his work on racism and ethnicity, his aesthetics and his resistance to the aestheticization of politics, his concepts of figuration, his assessment of the role of the exile in a metropolitan culture, and his work on music and the visual arts.
In two separate interviews, Said himself comments on a variety of topics, among them the response of the American Jewish community to his political efforts in the Middle East. Yet even as the Palestinian struggle finds a central place in his work, it is essential--as the contributors demonstrate--to see that this struggle rests on and gives power to his general "critique of colonizers" and is not simply the outgrowth of a local nationalism. Perhaps more than any other person in the United States, Said has changed how the U.S. media and American intellectuals must think about and represent Palestinians, Islam, and the Middle East. Most importantly, this change arises not as a result of political action but out of a potent humanism--a breadth of knowledge and insight that has nourished many fields of inquiry. Originally a special issue of "boundary 2," the book includes new articles on minority culture and on orientalism in music, as well as an interview with Said by Jacqueline Rose.
Supporting the claim that the last third of the twentieth century can be called the "Age of Said," this collection will enlighten and engage students in virtually any field of humanistic study.

"Contributors." Jonathan Arac, Paul A. Bove, Terry Cochran, Barbara Harlow, Kojin Karatani, Rashid I. Khalidi, Sabu Kohsu, Ralph Locke, Mustapha Marrouchi, Jim Merod, W. J. T. Mitchell, Aamir R. Mufti, Jacqueline Rose, Edward W. Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Lindsay Waters

In the decade that followed 1972, the journal "boundary 2" consistently published many of the most distinguished and most influential statements of an emerging literary postmodernism. Recognizing postmodernism as a dominant force in culture, particularly in the literary and narrative imagination, the journal appeared when literary critical study in the United States was in a period of theory-induced ferment. The fundamental relations between postmodernism and poststructuralism were being initially examined and the effort to formulate a critical sense of the postmodern was underway. In this volume, Paul A. Bove, the current editor of "boundary 2," has gathered many of those foundational essays and, as such, has assembled a basic text in the history of postmodernism.
Essays by noted cultural and literary theorists join with Bove's contemporary preface to represent the important and unique moment in recent intellectual history when postmodernism was no longer seen primarily as an architectural term, had not yet come to describe the wide range of culture it does now, but was finding power and place in the literary realm. These essays show that the history of postmodernism and its attendant critical theories are both more complex and more deeply bound with literary criticism than often is acknowledged today. "Early Postmodernism" demonstrates not only the significance of these literary studies, but also the role played by literary critical postmodernism in making possible newer forms of critical and cultural studies.
"Contributors," Barry Alpert, Charles Altieri, David Antin, Harold Bloom, Paul A. Bove, Helene Cixous, Gerald Gillespie, Ihab Hassan, Joseph N. Riddel, William, V.Spanos, Catharine R. Stimpson, Cornel West

A critique of the politics and practice of intellectuals and disciplines in postmodern society.

Identifying the historical antecedents of President George W. Bush's imperial ambitions and the sources of the reactionary thought and politics that underlie them, Paul A. Bove shows how neoconservatism represents a singular danger to democracy. At the same time, he criticizes the equally disheartening inability of the academic Left to oppose neoconservatives and its tendency to mirror their views instead. Divorced from historical knowledge and intellectual rigor, the neocon mindset reflects a cultural and historical amnesia that feeds on ignorance and conformity. Exposing the threats to national survival inherent in the alliance of right-wing politics and academic tribalism, Bove emphasizes the need to reconnect with the powers of imagination and the complexity of human historical experience. With urgency and passion, Bove shows how the neocons have succeeded in cowing or coopting academic intellectuals and how language has been used and abused for the maintenance and extension of an undemocratic regime.

The essays collected in this issue of boundary 2 were written in response to a call for papers that would treat the contemporary university, in various regions and stages of formation around the world, in light of the interaction between local and global realities. Underlying this project is the assumption that profound changes in economy and world organization transform the function and value of universities in tension not only with the regional histories and forces in which particular universities function but also with what used to be called "the idea of the university." The authors of these essays approach this topic in two ways: some present the history and current situation of the university in a given place and politics, and some write of the new university's political economy as the state withdraws support for higher education and hands the institutions over to entrepreneurial and transnational corporate culture. None of these essays defends the idea that the university pursues knowledge for its own sake. Yet there is a tinge of nostalgia for this idea, or at least for the idea that the university's task is to educate, to destroy bias, to cultivate. Of course, such an idea remains the public justification for the existence of the university, especially in the advanced capitalist societies, whose higher classes benefit the most from the globalization of economic production.