Translation/Transnation

"Honorable Mention for the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize" Kirsten Silva Gruesz is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This polished literary history argues forcefully that Latinos are not newcomers in the United States by documenting a vast network of Spanish-language cultural activity in the nineteenth century. Juxtaposing poems and essays by both powerful and peripheral writers, Kirsten Silva Gruesz proposes a major revision of the nineteenth-century U.S. canon and its historical contexts. Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials and building on an innovative interpretation of poetry's cultural role, Ambassadors of Culture brings together scattered writings from the borderlands of California and the Southwest as well as the cosmopolitan exile centers of New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. It reads these productions in light of broader patterns of relations between the U.S. and Latin America, moving from the fraternal rhetoric of the Monroe Doctrine through the expansionist crisis of 1848 to the proto-imperialist 1880s. It shows how ''ambassadors of culture'' such as Whitman, Longfellow, and Bryant propagated ideas about Latin America and Latinos through their translations, travel writings, and poems. In addition to these well-known figures and their counterparts in the work of nation-building in Cuba, Mexico, and Central and South America, this book also introduces unremembered women writers and local poets writing in both Spanish and English. In telling the almost forgotten early history of travels and translations between U.S. and Latin American writers, Gruesz shows that Anglo and Latino traditions in the New World were, from the beginning, deeply intertwined and mutually necessary. "Gruesz's [provides] lucid justification for directing students of nineteenth-century U.S. literature to ponder the efforts that certain North American writers made, in the 1820s and 30s, to foster a hemispheric consciousness and then, in the face of expansionist militarism during and after the 1840s, to mark out oppositional stances based on claims of distinctiveness concerning such things as religion, trade practices and philosophies of life. . . . [A] rich and suggestive undertaking."---Barbara Ryan, H-Amstdy "Gruesz's interesting study of 19th century Spanish language print culture in the US recognizes the contributions made by Latino poets and journalists to both US literary history and the construction of a Latino identity." "Ambassadors had me revising my American Literature syllabus before I had finished reading the Introduction."---Barbara Ryan, H-Net Reviews "This book is the best study of transamerican literary contact I have seen in a decade. It is the work of a consummate comparative Americanist who is conversant, often in breathtaking detail, with the literatures and cultures of a number of American geographies, both north and south. Gruesz has produced a comparative study par excellence, one that balances close readings with a rigorously historicist approach. Ambassadors of Culture is impressive on all counts and is a tremendous contribution."-Vera M. Kutzinski, Yale University "This is a splendid and gracefully written book-one of the most significant books in the field of American studies. Throughout Gruesz writes with clarity, directness, and elegance. She is without question one of the best inter-American literary historians today and ranks with the top comparative theorists generally."-José David Saldívar, University of California, Berkeley

Sandra Bermann is Professor and Department Chair of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She is the author of Sonnet over Time: A Study in the Sonnets of Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire, and her translation of Allesandro Manzoni's Del romanzo storico appeared as On the Historical Novel. Michael Wood is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is the author of The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (Princeton) and other books on literature and film. In recent years, scholarship on translation has moved well beyond the technicalities of converting one language into another and beyond conventional translation theory. With new technologies blurring distinctions between "the original" and its reproductions, and with globalization redefining national and cultural boundaries, "translation" is now emerging as a reformulated subject of lively, interdisciplinary debate. Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation enters the heart of this debate. It covers an exceptional range of topics, from simultaneous translation to legal theory, from the language of exile to the language of new nations, from the press to the cinema; and cultures and languages from contemporary Bengal to ancient Japan, from translations of Homer to the work of Don DeLillo. All twenty-two essays, by leading voices including Gayatri Spivak and the late Edward Said, are provocative and persuasive. The book's four sections--"Translation as Medium and across Media," "The Ethics of Translation," "Translation and Difference," and "Beyond the Nation"--together provide a comprehensive view of current thinking on nationality and translation, one that will be widely consulted for years to come. The contributors are Jonathan E. Abel, Emily Apter, Sandra Bermann, Vilashini Cooppan, Stanley Corngold, David Damrosch, Robert Eaglestone, Stathis Gourgouris, Pierre Legrand, Jacques Lezra, Françoise Lionnet, Sylvia Molloy, Yopie Prins, Edward Said, Azade Seyhan, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Henry Staten, Lawrence Venuti, Lynn Visson, Gauri Viswanathan, Samuel Weber, and Michael Wood. "Sure to become required reading for students and scholars of the subject, . . . this new volume presents a well-balanced view of the current state of the profession and contains an unusually large percentage of essays (fully half) that can be considered significant contributions to the field."---Susan Bernofsky, Modern Language Notes "This is a wonderful volume, a dance around the idea of 'translation,' threading it through a dozen languages and testing its claims through as many analytic registers. Each of its essays is lucid and compelling, with a substantial argument to make. Translation is given the broadest possible scope here, not exclusively text-based but embracing a wide range of phenomena, taking as its subject any act of revisiting, any 'remake' that brings new life to texts."-Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University "This book is a major contribution to discussions of translation and should be a reference for years to come. Its scope puts it in a class of its own. I know of no other book on translation that covers this variety of topics, languages, and cultures or that raises such interesting questions. Every single essay merits attention. Sandra Bermann's introduction is a model of clarity and an excellent summary of the issues discussed, and the section introductions are likewise commendable."-Jean Franco, Columbia University, author of The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War "The debate on cultural globalization suffers from an inability to tackle the notion of translation in its concrete linguistic and historical reality as well as in its broad philosophical dimensions. This book, edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood and lucidly introduced by Bermann, is an incisive contribution to an emerging kind of global translation studies. It contains an enormous amount of valua

Gil Z. Hochberg is assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Partition--the idea of separating Jews and Arabs along ethnic or national lines--is a legacy at least as old as the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. Challenging the widespread "separatist imagination" behind partition, Gil Hochberg demonstrates the ways in which works of contemporary Jewish and Arab literature reject simple notions of separatism and instead display complex configurations of identity that emphasize the presence of alterity within the self--the Jew within the Arab, and the Arab within the Jew. In Spite of Partition examines Hebrew, Arabic, and French works that are largely unknown to English readers to reveal how, far from being independent, the signifiers "Jew" and "Arab" are inseparable. In a series of original close readings, Hochberg analyzes fascinating examples of such inseparability. In the Palestinian writer Anton Shammas's Hebrew novel Arabesques, the Israeli and Palestinian protagonists are a "schizophrenic pair" who "have not yet decided who is the ventriloquist of whom." And in the Moroccan Jewish writer Albert Swissa's Hebrew novel Aqud, the Moroccan-Israeli main character's identity is uneasily located between the "Moroccan Muslim boy he could have been" and the "Jewish Israeli boy he has become." Other examples draw attention to the intricate linguistic proximity of Hebrew and Arabic, the historical link between the traumatic memories of the Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakbah, and the libidinal ties that bind Jews and Arabs despite, or even because of, their current animosity. "This is a necessary and timely book written in luminous prose. . . . In Spite of Partition offers readers contagiously exciting and productive readings that will surely stimulate future discussions, not only of the literary works themselves, but for thinking more creatively about ethnicity, identity, and shared histories and forms of belonging in this woefully unpromising first decade of the twenty-first century."---Ranen Omer-Sherman, Shofar "This new addition is a thoughtful, well-researched, and carefully constructed argument about the nature of the relationship between Arab and Jew, in its many apparitions and configurations. As such, it is an important addition to the progressive discourse around the future, as well as the past, of Palestine."---Gil Anidjar, Journal of Palestine Studies "Hochberg's political realism is supplemented with a specifically literary hope that reading can not only undo the effects of forgetting but expose the complex ties that bind Arab and Jew. Hochberg dares to articulate a shared history on the basis of a patient, copious, and persuasive reading of Arab and Jewish writers and critics, many of whom are not well understood by Anglophone readers. Through a disorientingly lucid, close, and provocative set of readings, she shows us that the cultural imagination has its crucial place in articulating the prospects for peace. She makes good on the claim that memory is crucial to imagining anew."-Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley "Hochberg's book is a poignant and rigorous demonstration of the power of literature to provide a space of cohabitation and confrontation that is an alternative to 'the logic of partition.' An important and timely intervention that will be of interest to all those who seek ways out of the impasses created by racial, cultural, religious, or political differences."-Françoise Lionnet, University of California, Los Angeles "This book is a testimony to the healing power of literature, its capacity to resist the mutilating logic of a social and political world whose realities it refuses simply to mirror. It deserves to be read by anyone who has the courage to imagine that underlying a conflict played out on a landscape disfigured by separating barriers, hideous walls, and strangling checkpoints, there persists the quintessentially hu

Étienne Balibar is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris-X and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. His previous books in English include Masses, Classes, Ideas, Politics and the Other Scene, Race, Nation, Class (with Immanuel Wallerstein), Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser), Spinoza and Politics, and The Philosophy of Marx. étienne Balibar has been one of Europe's most important philosophical and political thinkers since the 1960s. His work has been vastly influential on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the humanities and the social sciences. In We, the People of Europe?, he expands on themes raised in his previous works to offer a trenchant and eloquently written analysis of "transnational citizenship" from the perspective of contemporary Europe. Balibar moves deftly from state theory, national sovereignty, and debates on multiculturalism and European racism, toward imagining a more democratic and less state-centered European citizenship. Although European unification has progressively divorced the concepts of citizenship and nationhood, this process has met with formidable obstacles. While Balibar seeks a deep understanding of this critical conjuncture, he goes beyond theoretical issues. For example, he examines the emergence, alongside the formal aspects of European citizenship, of a "European apartheid," or the reduplication of external borders in the form of "internal borders" nurtured by dubious notions of national and racial identity. He argues for the democratization of how immigrants and minorities in general are treated by the modern democratic state, and the need to reinvent what it means to be a citizen in an increasingly multicultural, diversified world. A major new work by a renowned theorist, We, the People of Europe? offers a far-reaching alternative to the usual framing of multicultural debates in the United States while also engaging with these debates. "Balibar tackles a wide range of themes associated with a dialectic of the construction of 'Europe.' . . . The writing is clear, informed, and provocative." "There is much merit to this book as a work of political philosophy, inasmuch as it provides new analyses of the concept of sovereignty and develops new ideas about the nature of citizenship under post-modern conditions."---Gustav Peebles, Political Science Quarterly "This is clearly one of the most prodigious political accomplishments of our time. In open and engaging prose, Balibar offers a serious and thoroughgoing study of the problem of what constitutes citizenship under changing conditions of immigration in Europe. His critique is accompanied by a political vision of democracy at once chastened and hopeful."-Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley, author of The Psychic Life of Power "An extremely important book. Anything Balibar writes is sure to find an extremely eager audience in the United States. But the subject of this book-the new politics of immigration and racism in a newly unifying Europe, the very real threat that unification will mean a European version of apartheid, and the possibility that a transnational political counter-subject ("we, the people of Europe") can emerge to oppose globalization-is even more topical than those Balibar has led us to expect from him. His striking and sometimes dazzling commentaries on the various frameworks and discourses at play will be of immediate interest to readers in a wide range of fields."-Bruce Robbins, Columbia University, author of The Servant's Hand "Together these two volumes constitute an outstanding contribution to the field. They present the views and arguments of the major philosophers of the period with unmatched clarity and subject them to deep and critical scrutiny. In my view there is no other work on the history of twentieth-century century analytic philosophy that matches it in its scope, depth, and elegance."-Ali Kazmi, University

"Honorable Mention for the 2003 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies" Réda Bensmaïa is University Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. He is the author of The Barthes Effect, The Year of Passages, and a novel entitled Alger ou la maladie de la mémoire. Jean-Paul Sartre's famous question, "For whom do we write?" strikes close to home for francophone writers from the Maghreb. Do these writers address their compatriots, many of whom are illiterate or read no French, or a broader audience beyond Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia? In Experimental Nations, Réda Bensmaïa argues powerfully against the tendency to view their works not as literary creations worth considering for their innovative style or language but as "ethnographic" texts and to appraise them only against the "French literary canon." He casts fresh light on the original literary strategies many such writers have deployed to reappropriate their cultural heritage and "reconfigure" their nations in the decades since colonialism. Tracing the move from the anticolonial, nationalist, and arabist literature of the early years to the relative cosmopolitanism and diversity of Maghrebi francophone literature today, Bensmaïa draws on contemporary literary and postcolonial theory to "deterritorialize" its study. Whether in Assia Djebar's novels and films, Abdelkebir Khatabi's prose poems or critical essays, or the novels of Nabile Farès, Abdelwahab Meddeb, or Mouloud Feraoun, he raises the veil that hides the intrinsic richness of these artists' works from the eyes of even an attentive audience. Bensmaïa shows us how such Maghrebi writers have opened their nations as territories to rediscover and stake out, to invent, while creating a new language. In presenting this masterful account of "virtual" but veritable nations, he sets forth a new and fertile topography for francophone literature. "This book is a vehement but always fair-minded and intellectually serious contribution to current discussions of francophone literature. Réda Bensmaïa means to displace the boundaries of francophone studies. At the same time, he provokes a migration of highly 'theoretical' texts from their 'proper,' Parisian territory toward a different, experimental terrain. An accomplished scholar and lecturer, a bold, offbeat novelist, Bensmaïa is a dynamic presence in literary and cultural studies here and abroad. One wants to know his point of view."-Ann Smock, University of California, Berkeley "Réda Bensmaïa's Experimental Nations sets out to examine the issue of national identity, national language, and national culture in a context that makes the traditional definition of these categories problematic. The ideas are clearly articulated and developed in the various chapters dealing with writers from the Maghreb. This book represents an extremely interesting argument against reductive polarities in culture and a redefinition ofuniversalism outside of the colonial definition of uniform sameness."-Jean Michael Dash, New York University

Nicholas Brown is Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Utopian Generations develops a powerful interpretive matrix for understanding world literature--one that renders modernism and postcolonial African literature comprehensible in a single framework, within which neither will ever look the same. African literature has commonly been seen as representationally naïve vis-à-vis modernism, and canonical modernism as reactionary vis-à-vis postcolonial literature. What brings these two bodies of work together, argues Nicholas Brown, is their disposition toward Utopia or "the horizon of a radical reconfiguration of social relations.? Grounded in a profound rethinking of the Hegelian Marxist tradition, this fluently written book takes as its point of departure the partial displacement during the twentieth century of capitalism's "internal limit" (classically conceived as the conflict between labor and capital) onto a geographic division of labor and wealth. Dispensing with whole genres of commonplace contemporary pieties, Brown examines works from both sides of this division to create a dialectical mapping of different modes of Utopian aesthetic practice. The theory of world literature developed in the introduction grounds the subtle and powerful readings at the heart of the book--focusing on works by James Joyce, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ford Madox Ford, Chinua Achebe, Wyndham Lewis, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Pepetela. A final chapter, arguing that this literary dialectic has reached a point of exhaustion, suggests that a radically reconceived notion of musical practice may be required to discern the Utopian desire immanent in the products of contemporary culture. "Masterfully shuttling back and forth between Europe and Africa, Nicholas Brown gives us an exciting new perspective on modernism that is as philosophically astute as it is politically engaged."-Michael Hardt, Duke University, coauthor of Empire and Multitude "An enormously significant contribution to the fields of modernist and postcolonial literary and cultural studies. Nicholas Brown aims to 're-constellate' modernism and African literature within a single framework, and he does so with great success. Along the way, however, the book accomplishes a great deal more than this. For example, it provides a new, critical-theoretical account of modernism itself. Superbly well-organized and wonderfully well-written, the book is replete with sentences that resonate with the reader long after closing its pages."-Neil Larsen, University of California, Davis, author of Modernism and Hegemony "A complex, sensitive, and sophisticated investigation of the utopian aspects of both Western modernist literature and postcolonial African literature. Because modernist literature has become the standard of aesthetic achievement in Western literature, this is an audacious project. Brown not only gives equal weight to the two sets of works he is reading, but he reads each set on its own terms. As a result, he has produced an extremely useful and thought-provoking work of criticism that provides important new insights into both modernism and African literature."-M. Keith Booker, University of Arkansas, author of "Ulysses," Capitalism, and Colonialism "In Utopian Generations, Nicholas Brown's grasp of marxian analysis is subtle and his general argument about the literary configurations of the idea of Utopia and the sublime on the works of the modernist and African writers he examines is both riveting and insightful. However, the book's greatest strength lies in its detailed and multilayered analyses of the authors and the texts themselves. Every chapter contains moments of real brilliance, which derive directly from the analyses. In fact, the writing inadvertently illustrates a species of immanent criticism in the best Adornian sense, and in a way that proves really illuminating as a method of comparative scholarship."-A

Margaret Cohen is Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. She is the author of The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton) and Profane Illumination and the coeditor of Spectacles of Realism. Carolyn Dever is Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Feminism, In Theory and Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud. The Literary Channel defines a crucial transnational literary "zone" that shaped the development of the modern novel. During the first two centuries of the genre's history, Britain and France were locked in political, economic, and military struggle. The period also saw British and French writers, critics, and readers enthusiastically exchanging works, codes, and theories of the novel. Building on both nationally based literary history and comparatist work on poetics, this book rethinks the genre's evolution as marking the power and limits of modern cultural nationalism. In the Channel zone, the novel developed through interactions among texts, readers, writers, and translators that inextricably linked national literary cultures. It served as a forum to promote and critique nationalist clichés, whether from the standpoint of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, the insurgent nationalism of colonized spaces, or the non-nationalized culture of consumption. In the process, the Channel zone promoted codes that became the genre's hallmarks, including the sentimental poetics that would shape fiction through the nineteenth century. Uniting leading critics who bridge literary history and theory, The Literary Channel will appeal to all readers attentive to the future of literary studies, as well as those interested in the novel's development, British and French cultural history, and extra-national patterns of cultural exchange. Contributors include April Alliston, Emily Apter, Margaret Cohen, Joan DeJean, Carolyn Dever, Lynn Festa, Françoise Lionnet, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Sharon Marcus, Richard Maxwell, and Mary Helen McMurran. "This book powerfully argues that one can understand the long-term national traditions of the novel only by also understanding the long-term transnationality of the form. As a comparatist work, it intervenes to resituate the novel in the literary history of France and of England, and by doing this it also revises the overall history of the modern western novel. Building from some of the most challenging and valuable recent contributions to thinking about the novel as a modern form, it is at the cutting edge."-Jonathan Arac, Columbia University "This collection makes important new arguments about the rise and development of the novel in England and France; it adds significantly to our understanding of the relation between national literatures and nation-building in the modern era. Together the essays amply demonstrate the importance of cross-national analysis for literary studies. The book is sure to have a major impact on scholarly discussions of the novel in Europe and America."-Susan Maslan, University of California, Berkeley

David Damrosch is professor of comparative literature at Harvard University and a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association. His books include How to Read World Literature and What Is World Literature? (Princeton). Natalie Melas is associate professor of comparative literature at Cornell University and the author of All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison. Mbongiseni Buthelezi is a doctoral student in English and comparative literature at Columbia University. Key essays on comparative literature from the eighteenth century to today As comparative literature reshapes itself in today's globalizing age, it is essential for students and teachers to look deeply into the discipline's history and its present possibilities. The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature is a wide-ranging anthology of classic essays and important recent statements on the mission and methods of comparative literary studies. This pioneering collection brings together thirty-two pieces, from foundational statements by Herder, Madame de Staël, and Nietzsche to work by a range of the most influential comparatists writing today, including Lawrence Venuti, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Franco Moretti. Gathered here are manifestos and counterarguments, essays in definition, and debates on method by scholars and critics from the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, giving a unique overview of comparative study in the words of some of its most important practitioners. With selections extending from the beginning of comparative study through the years of intensive theoretical inquiry and on to contemporary discussions of the world's literatures, The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature helps readers navigate a rapidly evolving discipline in a dramatically changing world. "Combining classic essays with little-known pieces from across the centuries and around the world whose take on comparative literary study is especially pertinent to debates today, The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature will be an indispensable resource for debates about how to conceive of literary studies today and in the future, and a salutary reminder that for comparatists the questions posed by globalization have always been on the table."-Jonathan Culler, past president of the American Comparative Literature Association "Rebuilt many times on the high seas, comparative literature is a Noah's ark of texts, methodologies, languages, communities, and aspirations. This collection captures the restless, experimental, self-critical spirit of what has never been a discipline or a field but a project, from its emergence in the breakdown of Enlightenment universalism to current debates about circulation, translation, and value."-Haun Saussy, Yale University "This is an excellent anthology of the main texts that define the field of comparative literature. These pieces show how the discipline has been organized in the past and where it is going in an age of increased globalization. The excellent introductions are concise, clear, and well written. This is a book that all students of comparative literature will want to read."-Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania "No other book gathers essays forming the major lines of comparative literature study from the Enlightenment to the present. I have no doubt that it will benefit anyone who teaches introductory courses in comparative and world literature. It is easy to imagine an undergraduate or graduate course structured by this book, with several literary works read alongside each of its sections. And The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature is scrupulously well organized and edited, with concise, informative biographical introductions that reveal the kinds of negotiations of language, national identity, and struggle that are at the heart of the discipline."-Kevin McLaughlin, Brown University

Mary Helen McMurran is assistant professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. Fiction has always been in a state of transformation and circulation: how does this history of mobility inform the emergence of the novel? The Spread of Novels explores the active movements of English and French fiction in the eighteenth century and argues that the new literary form of the novel was the result of a shift in translation. Demonstrating that translation was both the cause and means by which the novel attained success, Mary Helen McMurran shows how this period was a watershed in translation history, signaling the end of a premodern system of translation and the advent of modern literary exchange. McMurran illuminates aspects of prose fiction translation history, including the radical revision of fiction's origins from that of cross-cultural transfer to one rooted by nation; the contradictory pressures of the book trade, which relied on translators to energize the market, despite the increasing devaluation of their labor; and the dynamic role played by prose fiction translation in Anglo-French relations across the Channel and in the New World. McMurran examines French and British novels, as well as fiction that circulated in colonial North America, and she considers primary source materials by writers as varied as Frances Brooke, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Françoise Graffigny. The Spread of Novels reassesses the novel's embodiment of modernity and individualism, discloses the novel's surprisingly unmodern characteristics, and recasts the genre's rise as part of a burgeoning vernacular cosmopolitanism. "McMurran's book valuably examines translation's role in the beginnings of English copyright law. . . . In demonstrating that nations believed to be unilingual were really multilingual, in affirming their readers' cosmopolitanism to the extent that they dipped into others' literatures, McMurran and her fellow essayists add significantly to studies of the English novel."---Nancy Vogeley, Eighteenth-Century Studies "McMurran draws convincing connections among the formations of nation, cosmopolitanism, and the novel, and she demonstrates the importance of the eighteenth century in producing these shifts. Her original and well-informed approach will attract considerable attention."-Felicity Nussbaum, University of California, Los Angeles "This important book establishes why the novel is not just English and why, indeed, even the English novel was never just English, or transatlantic, or Anglophone, but first and foremost translated and trans-Channel. I admire McMurran's conceptualization of translation's role in the formation of the novel in Europe and its colonies, and the fresh interpretations of texts, deftly combined with historical detail, from which her conclusions are drawn."-April Alliston, Princeton University

Timothy Bewes is associate professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Cynicism and Postmodernity and Reification, or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism. In a postcolonial world, where structures of power, hierarchy, and domination operate on a global scale, writers face an ethical and aesthetic dilemma: How to write without contributing to the inscription of inequality? How to process the colonial past without reverting to a pathology of self-disgust? Can literature ever be free of the shame of the postcolonial epoch--ever be truly postcolonial? As disparities of power seem only to be increasing, such questions are more urgent than ever. In this book, Timothy Bewes argues that shame is a dominant temperament in twentieth-century literature, and the key to understanding the ethics and aesthetics of the contemporary world. Drawing on thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Theodor Adorno, and Gilles Deleuze, Bewes argues that in literature there is an "event" of shame that brings together these ethical and aesthetic tensions. Reading works by J. M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Nadine Gordimer, V. S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Zoë Wicomb, Bewes presents a startling theory: the practices of postcolonial literature depend upon and repeat the same structures of thought and perception that made colonialism possible in the first place. As long as those structures remain in place, literature and critical thinking will remain steeped in shame. Offering a new mode of postcolonial reading, The Event of Postcolonial Shame demands a literature and a criticism that acknowledge their own ethical deficiency without seeking absolution from it. "Bewes has established himself as a leading theorist of negative affect. . . . Bewes's account of the materialization of shame that is less communicative than affective, and thus potentially transformative, should interest readers across the humanities and social sciences." "Whether one finds that Bewes's move to the structural level opens up new horizons for literary study or abstracts too decisively from historical situatedness will depend on one's theoretical inclinations. For readers of either proclivity, however, his intelligent and original book is likely to elicit a lively and engaged response."---Michael Rothberg, Project Muse "Bewes book constitutes a welcome and original intervention in postcolonial theory, and the questions he asks go to the heart of the postcolonial dilemma. . . . These questions are crucial, and Bewes' vision of 'a writing freed from the shaming, subtractive consciousness of a being who writes' surely points us in the right direction."---Ursula Kluwick, Project Muse "Compelling, probing, and conceptually masterful."---David James, Twentieth-Century Literature "There is much to be said in praise of Bewes' achievement in this work. The theoretical structure he proposes is outlined with admirable clarity in its opening sections, in clear prose that should be a model for academic writing. Each chapter refines and embellishes this theoretical structure, building logically on the work of preceding chapters and towards those that follow. Each theoretical innovation is elucidated through a textual encounter, and in each case the result is a strikingly original reading of a canonical postcolonial novel. . . . What he provides us with here is nothing less than a groundbreaking new theory of the novel."---Tom Langley, Interventions "Few books published recently in the field of postcolonial studies can rival the virtuosic brilliance of Timothy Bewes' The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Dense, challenging and thought-provoking, the work's dazzling erudition, which combines highly inventive readings of an impressive array of philosophers, writers, literary and cinematic texts, opens new critical inroads into the relation between ethics and aesthetics. . . . By framing and asking a set of fresh and inventive ones, Timothy Bewes challenge

Srinivas Aravamudan is Associate Professor of English and Director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. He is the author of Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804. Guru English is a bold reconceptualization of the scope and meaning of cosmopolitanism, examining the language of South Asian religiosity as it has flourished both inside and outside of its original context for the past two hundred years. The book surveys a specific set of religious vocabularies from South Asia that, Aravamudan argues, launches a different kind of cosmopolitanism into global use. Using "Guru English" as a tagline for the globalizing idiom that has grown up around these religions, Aravamudan traces the diffusion and transformation of South Asian religious discourses as they shuttled between East and West through English-language use. The book demonstrates that cosmopolitanism is not just a secular Western "discourse that results from a disenchantment with religion, but something that can also be refashioned from South Asian religion when these materials are put into dialogue with contemporary social move-ments and literary texts. Aravamudan looks at "religious forms of neoclassicism, nationalism, Romanticism, postmodernism, and nuclear millenarianism, bringing together figures such as Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi, and Deepak Chopra with Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, Robert Oppenheimer, and Salman Rushdie. Guru English analyzes writers and gurus, literary texts and religious movements, and the political uses of religion alongside the literary expressions of religious teachers, showing the cosmopolitan interconnections between the Indian subcontinent, the British Empire, and the American New Age. "A highly engaging, often brilliant and wide-ranging book with broad scholarly appeal. Aravamudan has produced a novel synthesis that goes beyond other works in the field to articulate a vision of the cosmopolitan range of Indic thought within the metropole. The book is an important contribution to postcolonial studies and to scholars working in comparative literature, anthropology, history, and globalization studies."-Bernard Bate, Yale University "An intellectual tour de force combining literary criticism, archival research, philosophical reflections, and cultural analysis. The elegant merging of various disciplinary fields makes Guru English an important reference tool for a variety of scholars interested in cultural globalization, religious studies, colonial and post-colonial formations, and literary criticism."-Marco Jacquemet, University of San Francisco "Rich in intelligent readings on a range of topics that are cleverly linked to the resuscitation, re-fashioning, and export of Asian religion."-Bruce Robbins, Columbia University "Guru English significantly extends the reach of postcolonial criticism by bringing into conversation literary theory and area studies. It presents some of the best analyses to date of the prose through which a colonial construct called 'Indian spiritualism' has found both a market and an afterlife in the contemporary world. Aravamudan's probing examination of the Hindu Right's language of nuclear triumphalism, of Rushdie's writings, and of the promises held out by a long line of transnational gurus-from the Maharishi to Deepak Chopra-will establish him as a major cultural commentator of our times."-Dipesh Chakrabarty, The University of Chicago "Guru English is an innovative and insightful analysis of the language used during the last two centuries in the discourse on religion in South Asia. The genes of British English were mutated by Indian requirements and the resulting language was indispensable to the redefining of Hinduism. Processed through orientalism, colonialism, and nationalism, it is now moving towards cosmopolitanism and the diaspora. The new texture of this language bears the heightened imprint of cultural and political concern

Margaret Litvin is assistant professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Boston University. For the past five decades, Arab intellectuals have seen themselves in Shakespeare's Hamlet: their times "out of joint," their political hopes frustrated by a corrupt older generation. Hamlet's Arab Journey traces the uses of Hamlet in Arabic theatre and political rhetoric, and asks how Shakespeare's play developed into a musical with a happy ending in 1901 and grew to become the most obsessively quoted literary work in Arab politics today. Explaining the Arab Hamlet tradition, Margaret Litvin also illuminates the "to be or not to be" politics that have turned Shakespeare's tragedy into the essential Arab political text, cited by Arab liberals, nationalists, and Islamists alike. On the Arab stage, Hamlet has been an operetta hero, a firebrand revolutionary, and a muzzled dissident. Analyzing productions from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Kuwait, Litvin follows the distinct phases of Hamlet's naturalization as an Arab. Her fine-grained theatre history uses personal interviews as well as scripts and videos, reviews, and detailed comparisons with French and Russian Hamlets. The result shows Arab theatre in a new light. Litvin identifies the French source of the earliest Arabic Hamlet, shows the outsize influence of Soviet and East European Shakespeare, and explores the deep cultural link between Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and the ghost of Hamlet's father. Documenting how global sources and models helped nurture a distinct Arab Hamlet tradition, Hamlet's Arab Journey represents a new approach to the study of international Shakespeare appropriation. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions. "Studying productions of Hamlet across the Arab world, including performances in Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, Egypt, and Syria, Litvin draws broad parallels between the struggles of Shakespeare's protagonist and the frustrated political and cultural hopes of Arab intellectuals. Citing an interesting variety of sources--from videos and reviews to scripts and interviews--the author provides a new perspective on how Shakespearean drama has been appropriated in various international and political contexts." "An exceptional work that crosses many disciplinary boundaries, Margaret Litvin's Hamlet's Arab Journey not only provides a new approach to the study of international Shakespeare appropriation, but also promises an engaging and narrative-rich point of access to the operations of Arab cultural and political identities."---Lobna Ismail, Theatre Research International "Remarkable and deserving of particular mention, Margaret Litvin's monograph Hamlet's Arab Journey presents far-reaching and unexpected outcomes. . . . Litvin's study, conducted with acumen and passion, uniquely emphasizes the potential impact of translating literature."---Federico Federici, Translation Studies "Hamlet's Arab Journey is an elegantly written, strongly argued book that would enrich courses in Arabic literature, cultural studies, and Middle East history."---Sonali Pahwa, International Journal of Middle East Studies "Reproductions of the revenge drama Hamlet in the Arab world, and the tragic plight of its famous protagonist Hamlet is meticulously followed by Margaret Litvin in her book Hamlet's Arab Journey, which benefits both the study of Arab theater and Shakespearean studies. . . . Litvin eloquently presents an artistic journey of a text that was conceived some four hundred years ago in England and continues to travel around the globe in different garbs. From this point of view, her approach transcends the colonial/post-colonial or influencer/influenced relationships as she presents her subject matter with great caution."---Dina Amin, Journal of Arabic Literature "A fascinating look at how one of the Western world's most iconic literary characters has been appropriated by Arabs as a symbol of secularism, nationalism, or

Emily Apter is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University. Her most recent book is Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects. Translation, before 9/11, was deemed primarily an instrument of international relations, business, education, and culture. Today it seems, more than ever, a matter of war and peace. In The Translation Zone, Emily Apter argues that the field of translation studies, habitually confined to a framework of linguistic fidelity to an original, is ripe for expansion as the basis for a new comparative literature. Organized around a series of propositions that range from the idea that nothing is translatable to the idea that everything is translatable, The Translation Zone examines the vital role of translation studies in the "invention" of comparative literature as a discipline. Apter emphasizes "language wars" (including the role of mistranslation in the art of war), linguistic incommensurability in translation studies, the tension between textual and cultural translation, the role of translation in shaping a global literary canon, the resistance to Anglophone dominance, and the impact of translation technologies on the very notion of how translation is defined. The book speaks to a range of disciplines and spans the globe. Ultimately, The Translation Zone maintains that a new comparative literature must take stock of the political impact of translation technologies on the definition of foreign or symbolic languages in the humanities, while recognizing the complexity of language politics in a world at once more monolingual and more multilingual. "This is a terrific book and a great pleasure to read. At once creative and provocative, Apter's witty analyses of multilingual matters in literature makes a major contribution to a range of disciplines from translation studies, comparative literature and linguistics, postcolonial studies, to mainstream literary studies in French and English. What is so unusual is the impressive breadth and range of Apter's reading in literatures across the globe. This is a book that will make readers want to rethink the limits of their own disciplines, and retranslate the concepts that they employ."-Robert J. C. Young, Oxford University, author of Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction "The Translation Zone offers a richly detailed history of Comparative Literature, a field volatile from the first, looking to contrary horizons, and never more so than at the present moment. Emily Apter explores the roads taken and not taken in the past, linking these to the new, cross-fertilized languages that constitute and energize the field in the future."-Wai Chee Dimock, author of Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep

Azade Seyhan is the Fairbank Professor in the Humanities and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Bryn Mawr College. She is author of Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism. Some of the most innovative writers of contemporary literature are writing in diaspora in their second or third language. Here Azade Seyhan describes the domain of transnational poetics they inhabit. She begins by examining the works of selected bilingual and bicultural writers of the United States (including Oscar Hijuelos, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Eva Hoffman) and Germany (Libuse Moníková, Rafik Schami, and E. S. Özdamar, among others), developing a new framework for understanding the relationship between displacement, memory, and language. Considering themes of loss, witness, translation, identity, and exclusion, Seyhan interprets diasporic literatures as condensed archives of cultural and linguistic memory that give integrity and coherence to pasts ruptured by migration. The book next compares works by contemporary Chicana and Turkish-German women writers as innovative and sovereign literary voices within the larger national cultures of the United States and Germany. Seyhan identifies in American multiculturalism critical clues for analyzing new cultural formations in Europe and maintains that Germany's cultural transformation suggests new ways of reading the American literary mosaic. Her approach, however, extends well beyond these two literatures. She creates a critical map of a "third geography," where a transnational, multilingual literary movement is gathering momentum. Writing Outside the Nation both contributes to and departs from postcolonial studies in that it focuses specifically on transnational writers working outside of their "mother tongue" and compares American and German diasporic literatures within a sophisticated conceptual framework. It illustrates how literature's symbolic economy can reclaim lost personal and national histories, as well as connect disparate and distant cultural traditions. "Azade Seyhan's innovative analysis of diasporic and transnational writing will certainly instigate re-interpretations of literary texts beyond the scope of her own study. [T]he achievement and importance of Seyhan's Writing Outside the Nation are unmistakable."---Gerd Bayer, German Studies Reviews "This is a subtle, timely, well-informed, and engaging study. It acknowledges, draws upon, and yet also substantially expands upon a large and diversified body of existing scholarship(s), and it effectively accomplishes that rarity: the ability to move between informed theoretical reflection and specific literary analysis in such a way that each is deepened by and benefits from the other. It should appeal to a very wide audience, both to the specialist in a variety of disciplines and to the general reader. I recommend this book with unreserved enthusiasm."-Marc A. Weiner, Indiana University "Seyhan explores contemporary literary expressions of diasporic experiences in a multifaceted comparative and theoretical framework that is highly original. Writing Outside the Nation will be a major contribution to humanistic disciplines. Its synthesizing features will help gain an integral view of diverse literary, critical, and theoretical works on exile. The interpretive analyses should inspire new studies or other narratives of diaspora."-Ülker Gökberk, Reed College

"Winner of a 2013 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Nonfiction, Lannan Foundation" Andrew N. Rubin is assistant professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the coeditor of Adorno: A Critical Reader and The Edward Said Reader. Combining literary, cultural, and political history, and based on extensive archival research, including previously unseen FBI and CIA documents, Archives of Authority argues that cultural politics--specifically America's often covert patronage of the arts--played a highly important role in the transfer of imperial authority from Britain to the United States during a critical period after World War II. Andrew Rubin argues that this transfer reshaped the postwar literary space and he shows how, during this time, new and efficient modes of cultural transmission, replication, and travel--such as radio and rapidly and globally circulated journals--completely transformed the position occupied by the postwar writer and the role of world literature. Rubin demonstrates that the nearly instantaneous translation of texts by George Orwell, Thomas Mann, W. H. Auden, Richard Wright, Mary McCarthy, and Albert Camus, among others, into interrelated journals that were sponsored by organizations such as the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom and circulated around the world effectively reshaped writers, critics, and intellectuals into easily recognizable, transnational figures. Their work formed a new canon of world literature that was celebrated in the United States and supposedly represented the best of contemporary thought, while less politically attractive authors were ignored or even demonized. This championing and demonizing of writers occurred in the name of anti-Communism--the new, transatlantic "civilizing mission" through which postwar cultural and literary authority emerged. "Archives of Authority is a valuable and thought-provoking work. . . . Archives of Authority will be of great interest to literature scholars, postcolonial theorists, and Cold War specialists across the disciplines. Its critique of cultural instrumentality and appeal for a Said-inflected humanism speak to the stakes of intellectual inquiry, reminding us that in exposing the process by which an unjust world is made, we arm ourselves with the tools to build a different one."---Kirsten Weld, Journal of Archival Organization "This is a brilliant and highly original investigation of how Cold War politics shaped the emergence of world literature and new forms of cultural authority, literary consecration, and political surveillance in the aftermath of the Second World War. Eye-opening and provocative, Archives of Authority is indispensable reading for all serious scholars of world literature, Cold War cultural politics, and globalization."-Anne McClintock, University of Wisconsin-Madison "Examining the period after World War II, when the United States took on an imperial role previously played by Britain, this remarkable book shows the ways in which Western cultural policies, in opposition to Soviet cultural-political efforts, helped literary culture establish certain authors, while excluding others from attention, leading to a new phase of world literature. The research is extensive and impressive."-Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh "Enacting a kind of literary archaeology, Rubin's illuminating and necessary book traces the administration of literary culture and its shift from Anglo to American imperial power. Systematic without being sensationalistic, Rubin's journey through the archive allows us to see the epochal changes of Cold War culture that are still with us in ever greater relief."-Ammiel Alcalay, CUNY Graduate Center "This is an exciting exploration of important categories in world literature, a lucid explanation for its rise and fall, and an excellent argument for its careful reconsideration."-Paul Bové, University of Pittsburgh "Rubin reminds us how the insights of a literary way of thinking to the assess

"Winner of the 2012 Barbara and George Perkins Prize, The International Society for the Study of Narrative" "Winner of the 2010-2011 Louis Gottschalk Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies" "Second Runner-Up for the 2011 Harry Levin Prize, American Comparative Literature Association" Margaret Cohen teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where she holds the Andrew B. Hammond Chair of French Language, Literature, and Civilization. She is the author of Profane Illumination and The Sentimental Education of the Novel. For a century, the history of the novel has been written in terms of nations and territories: the English novel, the French novel, the American novel. But what if novels were viewed in terms of the seas that unite these different lands? Examining works across two centuries, The Novel and the Sea recounts the novel's rise, told from the perspective of the ship's deck and the allure of the oceans in the modern cultural imagination. Margaret Cohen moors the novel to overseas exploration and work at sea, framing its emergence as a transatlantic history, steeped in the adventures and risks of the maritime frontier. Cohen explores how Robinson Crusoe competed with the best-selling nautical literature of the time by dramatizing remarkable conditions, from the wonders of unknown lands to storms, shipwrecks, and pirates. She considers James Fenimore Cooper's refashioning of the adventure novel in postcolonial America, and a change in literary poetics toward new frontiers and to the maritime labor and technology of the nineteenth century. Cohen shows how Jules Verne reworked adventures at sea into science fiction; how Melville, Hugo, and Conrad navigated the foggy waters of language and thought; and how detective and spy fiction built on sea fiction's problem-solving devices. She also discusses the transformation of the ocean from a theater of skilled work to an environment of pristine nature and the sublime. A significant literary history, The Novel and the Sea challenges readers to rethink their land-locked assumptions about the novel. "In her bracing, often scintillating book about the associations of prose fiction and the ocean since the early eighteenth century, Margaret Cohen laments that critics have themselves tended not to trouble readers with the details of adventures at sea. . . . [H]er revisionist account is much needed."---Matthew Beaumont, Times Literary Supplement "Cohen's ambitious and refreshing analysis productively connects oceanic studies, studies of the novel, and comparative literature of the long nineteenth century, brings an old archive into a new critical frame, and offers new possibilities for theorizing the novel-as-form."---Gretchen J. Woertendyke, Novel "[M]any . . . texts touched on or explored at length in The Novel and the Sea receive equal, illuminating, and masterful treatment as individual representatives of the many genres of the maritime book. Further, that treatment is less interpretation than searching description. Bringing to bear a historically specific and technical lexicon, Cohen restores these texts' legibility. Practicing a form of so-called surface reading more interested in what the texts forthrightly say than in what they conceal, she renews their pertinence. No critic could hope to do more."---Cannon Schmitt, Victorian Studies "Cohen's eminently readable, learned, and well-illustrated book deserves a wide readership." "Lucid, original, and steeped in references both scholarly and popular, this book will particularly delight those who love the sea." "Cohen's breadth and depth of research is immense, even awe-inspiring. . . . The Novel and the Sea is a brilliant work of literary scholarship and an important book to the studies of literature of the sea."---Richard J. King, Sea History "Maritime historians often find entertainment by reading maritime novels. . . . Margaret Cohen's book promises to add welcome background and

"Named a Harvard University Walter Channing Cabot Fellow for 2014" John T. Hamilton is professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. He is the author of Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language and Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the Classical Tradition. From national security and social security to homeland and cyber-security, "security" has become one of the most overused words in culture and politics today. Yet it also remains one of the most undefined. What exactly are we talking about when we talk about security? In this original and timely book, John Hamilton examines the discursive versatility and semantic vagueness of security both in current and historical usage. Adopting a philological approach, he explores the fundamental ambiguity of this word, which denotes the removal of "concern" or "care" and therefore implies a condition that is either carefree or careless. Spanning texts from ancient Greek poetry to Roman Stoicism, from Augustine and Luther to Machiavelli and Hobbes, from Kant and Nietzsche to Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, Hamilton analyzes formulations of security that involve both safety and negligence, confidence and complacency, certitude and ignorance. Does security instill more fear than it assuages? Is a security purchased with freedom or human rights morally viable? How do security projects inform our expectations, desires, and anxieties? And how does the will to security relate to human finitude? Although the book makes clear that security has always been a major preoccupation of humanity, it also suggests that contemporary panics about security and the related desire to achieve perfect safety carry their own very significant risks. "[This] is a wonderfully rich volume that makes punctual yet decisive incursions leading to brilliant new readings of canonical texts. . . . Through the cornucopia of its corpus and the generosity of its gesture, Security is above all an invitation to think along, to think further and deeper, to pursue the project of the book on a yet wider corpus. It invites us to practice the philology of care in our approach to books but also to the world."---Hall Bjornstad, L'Esprit Créateur "[A] masterful meditation."---Ellwood Wiggins, Modern Language Quarterly "Excellent." "John Hamilton's meditation on 'security'-the word and the thing-ranges, with uncommon erudition, over centuries of thought, from Hyginus's Latin fable on Cura (a marvelous beginning) to Heidegger and Homeland Security. Hamilton's philological skill, intellectual historical imagination, and critical brio fuse in a radiant explication of Goethe's Faust; indeed, the trajectory of his thought is itself Faustian in its appetite and willpower."-Stanley Corngold, author of Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine "Broad and deep, learned and incisive, Security traces crisscrossing arcs from Roman securitas, back to Greek asphaleia, up through renaissance allegorization and the major thinkers of the Western tradition until our own times. The paradox of security, a state of lacking care, sets up a double bind between being carefree and carelessness. Hamilton's philological method resists the degradation that comes with a governmental monopolization of security measures and proposes instead a flexible, more humane politics."-Michèle Lowrie, University of Chicago "This is an important and absolutely timely exploration of security in all its intonations, structures, and puzzlements, from the classical world to the present. Hamilton moves with breathtaking ease between different languages, contexts, traditions, and periods, as well as different discourses, including literature, philosophy, anthropology, religion, political theory, painting, and film. Lucid, persuasive, and enlightening, this is a tour de force."-Paul Fleming, Cornell University "Hamilton brings a vitally humanist and historicist perspective to the complex ideas, fears, risks, and desires that the word 'security' names

"Winner of a 2015 Outstanding Reference Sources Award, Reference and User Services Association, American Library Association" "One of The Guardian's Best Books of 2015, selected by Hari Kunzru" "One of The Times Literary Supplement's Books of the Year 2014, chosen by David Wootton" "One of The Times Higher Education Supplement's Books of the Year 2014, chosen by Robert S. C. Gordon" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2014" Barbara Cassin is director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Emily Apter is professor of comparative literature and French at New York University. Jacques Lezra is professor of Spanish, Portuguese and comparative literature at NYU. Michael Wood is the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Characters in some languages, particularly Hebrew and Arabic, may not display properly due to device limitations. Transliterations of terms appear before the representations in foreign characters. This is an encyclopedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy-or any-translation from one language and culture to another. Drawn from more than a dozen languages, terms such as Dasein (German), pravda (Russian), saudade (Portuguese), and stato (Italian) are thoroughly examined in all their cross-linguistic and cross-cultural complexities. Spanning the classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary periods, these are terms that influence thinking across the humanities. The entries, written by more than 150 distinguished scholars, describe the origins and meanings of each term, the history and context of its usage, its translations into other languages, and its use in notable texts. The dictionary also includes essays on the special characteristics of particular languages--English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Originally published in French, this one-of-a-kind reference work is now available in English for the first time, with new contributions from Judith Butler, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ben Kafka, Kevin McLaughlin, Kenneth Reinhard, Stella Sandford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Tylus, Anthony Vidler, Susan Wolfson, Robert J. C. Young, and many more.The result is an invaluable reference for students, scholars, and general readers interested in the multilingual lives of some of our most influential words and ideas. • Covers close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms that defy easy translation between languages and cultures • Includes terms from more than a dozen languages • Entries written by more than 150 distinguished thinkers • Available in English for the first time, with new contributions by Judith Butler, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ben Kafka, Kevin McLaughlin, Kenneth Reinhard, Stella Sandford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Tylus, Anthony Vidler, Susan Wolfson, Robert J. C. Young, and many more • Contains extensive cross-references and bibliographies • An invaluable resource for students and scholars across the humanities "[W]hat may be the weirdest book the twenty-first century has so far produced. . . . [T]his is a considerable and entertaining book, full of odd words beautifully, at times owlishly, annotated."---Adam Gopnik, New Yorker "[An] extraordinary book. . . . Many of the entries are illuminating, but what is most fascinating about the book is its partial vision of a fragment of European culture, through the dissection of its philosophical vocabulary."---Tim Crane, Times Literary Supplement "[A] cornucopia of lexical trajectories and semantic adventures across a wide variety of languages and histories. . . . As for the achievement of Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood in orchestrating the English edition, that qualifies as heroic . . . this book is another valuable reminder that a philosophy that ignores i

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2016" "Longlisted for the 2017 Alan Paton Award for Non-Fiction, Sunday Times" Mark Sanders is professor of comparative literature at New York University. His books include Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid and Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission. "Why are you learning Zulu?" When Mark Sanders began studying the language, he was often asked this question. In Learning Zulu, Sanders places his own endeavors within a wider context to uncover how, in the past 150 years of South African history, Zulu became a battleground for issues of property, possession, and deprivation. Sanders combines elements of analysis and memoir to explore a complex cultural history. Perceiving that colonial learners of Zulu saw themselves as repairing harm done to Africans by Europeans, Sanders reveals deeper motives at work in the development of Zulu-language learning-from the emergence of the pidgin Fanagalo among missionaries and traders in the nineteenth century to widespread efforts, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to teach a correct form of Zulu. Sanders looks at the white appropriation of Zulu language, music, and dance in South African culture, and at the association of Zulu with a martial masculinity. In exploring how Zulu has come to represent what is most properly and powerfully African, Sanders examines differences in English- and Zulu-language press coverage of an important trial, as well as the role of linguistic purism in xenophobic violence in South Africa. Through one person's efforts to learn the Zulu language, Learning Zulu explores how a language's history and politics influence all individuals in a multilingual society. "In this deeply introspective memoir, Sanders focuses on his quest to learn the Zulu language. . . . A valuable resource for history and political science as well as language." "Well written and well researched. . . . The book is a good testimony of resistance and survival of the Zulu people, culture, and isiZulu the language."---Shirley Mthethwa-Sommers, African Studies Quarterly "Ostensibly about one man's quest to acquire a language, Learning Zulu is a clever, surprising, and enlightening journey into 150 years of South African history. Nobody has written quite this subtly about race and language in South Africa in a long while." -Jonny Steinberg, University of Oxford "Learning Zulu is a brilliant book. Unprecedented in the South African arena and very likely beyond, Sanders's 'secret history' is nothing less than a sustained tour de force and an extraordinary mix of linguistics, literary criticism, cultural studies, legal studies, psychoanalytic theory, and autobiography/memoir. This is very much a book about the psychic and psychopolitical investments involved in acquiring and teaching language in colonial and postcolonial settings."-Stephen Clingman, University of Massachusetts, Amherst "Mark Sanders has written a remarkable book that combines analysis and memoir, and mines documentary material and the individual experience of learning Zulu, to unearth the complex and sometimes controversial meanings of Zulu language, culture, and imagery for South Africans and others around the world. Learning Zulu will capture the attention of all readers interested in translation, self-formation, and cultural history in multilingual societies across the globe."-Loren Kruger, University of Chicago "This book offers a historical account of the Zulu language in South Africa from the nineteenth century to the present. Exploring the psychological significance and symbolic meaning of the language in the South African social imaginary, the work does a real service to the Zulu language and identity by pointing to the richness and complexity of its more recent history. Learning Zulu makes available a wealth of fascinating material."-Gareth Cornwell, Rhodes University

"Co-Winner of the 2016 MLA Prize for a First Book, Modern Language Association" Michael Allan is assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Oregon. We have grown accustomed to understanding world literature as a collection of national or linguistic traditions bound together in the universality of storytelling. Michael Allan challenges this way of thinking and argues instead that the disciplinary framework of world literature, far from serving as the neutral meeting ground of national literary traditions, levels differences between scripture, poetry, and prose, and fashions textual forms into a particular pedagogical, aesthetic, and ethical practice. In the Shadow of World Literature examines the shift from Qur'anic schooling to secular education in colonial Egypt and shows how an emergent literary discipline transforms the act of reading itself. The various chapters draw from debates in literary theory and anthropology to consider sites of reception that complicate the secular/religious divide-from the discovery of the Rosetta stone and translations of the Qur'an to debates about Charles Darwin in the modern Arabic novel. Through subtle analysis of competing interpretative frames, Allan reveals the ethical capacities and sensibilities literary reading requires, the conceptions of textuality and critique it institutionalizes, and the forms of subjectivity it authorizes. A brilliant and original exploration of what it means to be literate in the modern world, this book is a unique meditation on the reading practices that define the contours of world literature. "Allan's incisive In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt mobilizes reading as a framework for interrogating the now ubiquitous field of world literature. . . . In the Shadow of World Literature's critical self-positioning of its own sites of reading (US academia, comparative literature, the Egyptian colonial archive), alongside consistent signposting for the book's broader argument, are a refreshing departure from the stylistic tendencies of most first monographs."---Hoda El Shakry, Journal of Arabic Literature "With impressive learning and critical insight, Allan argues that the arrival of modern Arabic writing into the space of world literature is a sign not so much of its progress as of the emergence of a new discipline that shapes particular reading practices as proper and dismisses others as ignorant. This is a truly remarkable work about the transformation of sensibilities that underlie the modern concept of progressive politics."-Talal Asad, author of Formations of the Secular "Allan compellingly rethinks the category of world literature for its role in promoting distinctions between literate and illiterate, rational and irrational, and cosmopolitan and fanatic in colonial Egypt. These distinctions, he argues insightfully, are important to the ways that literary sensibilities affect the reception of religious and scriptural traditions. In the Shadow of World Literature illuminates how literature's mediation of the world experienced by readers prompts different responses that shape new forms of secular criticism in postcolonial societies."-Gauri Viswanathan, Columbia University "In the Shadow of World Literature is beautifully written, well argued, and accessible to an audience ranging from the educated public to literary experts. Allan carefully weaves his argument, simultaneously practicing and critiquing world literature in the best comparative sense possible."-Tarek El-Ariss, author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political "In the Shadow of World Literature contributes to a growing body of work in comparative literature that takes up Arabic language and literature, and offers a significant new approach to how Arabic traditions of learning, recitation, and instruction mediate the constitution of the literary object. I know of no other book that examines ways of

"Shortlisted for the ASAP Book Prize, Association for the Arts of the Present" Tarek El-Ariss is professor and chair of Middle Eastern studies at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political and the editor of The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda. How digital media are transforming Arab culture, literature, and politics In recent years, Arab activists have confronted authoritarian regimes both on the street and online, leaking videos and exposing atrocities, and demanding political rights. Tarek El-Ariss situates these critiques of power within a pervasive culture of scandal and leaks and shows how cultural production and political change in the contemporary Arab world are enabled by digital technology yet emerge from traditional cultural models. Focusing on a new generation of activists and authors from Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, El-Ariss connects WikiLeaks to The Arabian Nights, Twitter to mystical revelation, cyberattacks to pre-Islamic tribal raids, and digital activism to the affective scene-making of Arab popular culture. He shifts the epistemological and historical frameworks from the postcolonial condition to the digital condition and shows how new media challenge the novel as the traditional vehicle for political consciousness and intellectual debate. Theorizing the rise of "the leaking subject" who reveals, contests, and writes through chaotic yet highly political means, El-Ariss investigates the digital consciousness, virality, and affective forms of knowledge that jolt and inform the public and that draw readers in to the unfolding fiction of scandal. Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals maps the changing landscape of Arab modernity, or Nahda, in the digital age and traces how concepts such as the nation, community, power, the intellectual, the author, and the novel are hacked and recoded through new modes of confrontation, circulation, and dissent. "A bold effort to redefine Arab literary and cultural studies in the contexts of social media and the digital information age . . . . . provocative and ultimately sublime."---Joel Gordon, Critical Inquiry "In this pioneering and vitally important book, El-Ariss confronts readers with a new digital reality in which accepted norms of reception and evaluation are challenged, parodied, or abandoned. In their place, the culture of leaks and hacks prevails. The implications of his findings extend far beyond the context of the Arabic-speaking world."-Roger Allen, professor emeritus, University of Pennsylvania "Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals is a truly significant book, combining cutting-edge research on digital media in the Arab world with insights into classical Arabic literature. El-Ariss's topic could not be more important."-Ellen Anne McLarney, author of Soft Force: Women in Egypt's Islamic Awakening "Through riveting examples ranging from anonymous hackers targeting the Lebanese government to renegade Saudi Twitter users, El-Ariss provides a compelling look at the links between contemporary Arabic literary production and the culture of scandal. Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals is required reading for anyone seeking to understand contemporary Arab culture in the digital age."-Brian T. Edwards, author of After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East "Bold and exciting."-Emily Apter, author of Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability

"Winner of the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize, MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University" Robyn Creswell is assistant professor of comparative literature at Yale University and a former poetry editor at the Paris Review. His writings have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and Harper's Magazine, among many other publications. He is the translator of Abdelfattah Kilito's The Tongue of Adam and Sonallah Ibrahim's "That Smell" and "Notes from Prison." How poetic modernism shaped Arabic intellectual debates in the twentieth century and beyond City of Beginnings is an exploration of modernism in Arabic poetry, a movement that emerged in Beirut during the 1950s and became the most influential and controversial Arabic literary development of the twentieth century. Robyn Creswell introduces English-language readers to a poetic movement that will be uncannily familiar-and unsettlingly strange. He also provides an intellectual history of Lebanon during the early Cold War, when Beirut became both a battleground for rival ideologies and the most vital artistic site in the Middle East. Arabic modernism was centered on the legendary magazine Shi'r ("Poetry"), which sought to put Arabic verse on "the map of world literature." The Beiruti poets-Adonis, Yusuf al-Khal, and Unsi al-Hajj chief among them-translated modernism into Arabic, redefining the very idea of poetry in that literary tradition. City of Beginnings includes analyses of the Arab modernists' creative encounters with Ezra Pound, Saint-John Perse, and Antonin Artaud, as well as their adaptations of classical literary forms. The book also reveals how the modernists translated concepts of liberal individualism, autonomy, and political freedom into a radical poetics that has shaped Arabic literary and intellectual debate to this day. " City of Beginnings offers a plethora of sophisticated and accessible close readings of modernist poetry. Creswell weaves them deftly into the cold war context and the shifting political and cultural struggles of the day. . . . Creswell's well-researched book will be a yardstick for years to come of how to combine literary criticism and intellectual history of the Arab world."---Jens Hanssen, Journal of Arabic Literature "Beirut has been overlooked in classic histories of modernism, yet Creswell . . . has remedied this with eloquence and erudition in his study of how a group of exiles, iconoclasts, and émigrés-al-Khal, Adonis, and the Lebanese poet Unsi al-Hajj foremost among them-radically transformed Arabic poetry."---Anna Della Subin, New York Review of Books "A pleasure to read, both for the lucidity of its prose as for the tacit but evident sympathy of imagination that enlivens it throughout. Creswell's translations are exact but nuanced. . . . Creswell succeeds admirably in his initial aim. He has set Modernist Beirut firmly on the map."---Eric Ormsby, Etudes Asiatiques "In this extraordinary and original work, Robyn Creswell combines poetry criticism and intellectual history to produce one of the finest accounts of Arab modernism."---Qussay al-Attabi, International Journal of Middle East Studies "Robyn Creswell's new book on Arabic Modernism, City of Beginnings, is half a Cold War thriller starring poets . . . [and] half . . . applied theory. Creswell's book is worth your time . . . it creates a space for Arabic Modernism in avant-garde poetics departments in English speaking countries."---Devin Kin, Fence Digital "[Robyn] Creswell's City of Beginnings is a story of [an] irreverent, incandescent Beirut, of a coterie of young Arabophone writers, cosmopolitan iconoclasts who made [a] Beirut of multiple identities home. . . . To the student of the Middle East, Arabic literature, literary modernism, or Near Eastern intellectual history, this book is a learned, nuanced, and deeply searching guide."---Franck Salameh, Middle East Quarterly "

"Shortlisted for the ASAP Book Prize, Association for the Arts of the Present" "Winner of the First Book Prize, Modern Language Association" Akshya Saxena is assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt University. How English has become a language of the people in India-one that enables the state but also empowers protests against it Against a groundswell of critiques of global English, Vernacular English argues that literary studies are yet to confront the true political import of the English language in the world today. A comparative study of three centuries of English literature and media in India, this original and provocative book tells the story of English in India as a tale not of imperial coercion, but of a people's language in a postcolonial democracy. Focusing on experiences of hearing, touching, remembering, speaking, and seeing English, Akshya Saxena delves into a previously unexplored body of texts from English and Hindi literature, law, film, visual art, and public protests. She reveals little-known debates and practices that have shaped the meanings of English in India and the Anglophone world, including the overlooked history of the legislation of English in India. She also calls attention to how low castes and minority ethnic groups have routinely used this elite language to protest the Indian state. Challenging prevailing conceptions of English as a vernacular and global lingua franca, Vernacular English does nothing less than reimagine what a language is and the categories used to analyze it. "Saxena stretches out her net to bring in not just everyday Indians but all those assailed by a brutal state and needing a medium to express their pain."---Peggy Mohan, The Wire " The focus on a vast and understudied archive, nuanced textual readings, and sustained attention to the sensory modes of engaging with language allows [Vernacular English] to prise open the political and affective terrains of English in India."---Navaneetha Mokkil, South Asia "Saxena's study of different domains toward the co-optation of English as an instrument of empowerment makes the concept of 'Vernacular English' a good alternative to the accepted mindset that English is a language of the elites in India."---Soni Wadhwa, Asian Review of Books "One of the most fascinating studies on translation andextra-translational ways of perception. . . . Saxena succeeds to offer a relatively deeper and fresher view on theconstruction of the Anglophone that has lately become a homogenous term for global politics."---Ayan Chakraborty, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics "A notable addition to existing historical, cultural, and literary scholarship that problematises the singularity of the English language and pays attention to the blurriness between the local and the global."---Shwetha Chandrashekhar, South Asian History and Culture "Vernacular English . . . is crucial scholarship in the continuing resilience of the perspectives afforded by researching postcoloniality beyond the strict space-time of historical colonialism"---Saronik Bosu, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry "This is a brilliant, compelling, and startlingly counterintuitive account of the vernacular life of English in a postcolonial society. Saxena's book sparkles with insights on the afterlife of English as a popular, demotic, and multimediated tongue in contemporary India. Traversing effortlessly from political, legal, and activist discourses to Bollywood and Dalit literature, Vernacular English is an outstanding example of the decolonial turn in English Studies."-Debjani Ganguly, University of Virginia "With a wealth of seldom explored resources, Saxena tells the compelling story of how English becomes intelligible as an everyday object-a vernacular-in India. Challenging dominant assumptions about postcolonial, world, and Anglophone literatures, she offers instead an astutely caste-sensitive analysis of language as a contentious an

Haun Saussy is University Professor at the University of Chicago and teaches in the Committee on Social Thought, the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, the department of Comparative Literature, and the College. His books include Translation as Citation: Zhuangzi Inside Out, The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies, and The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic. A groundbreaking account of translation and identity in the Chinese literary tradition before 1850-with important ramifications for today Debates on the canon, multiculturalism, and world literature often take Eurocentrism as the target of their critique. But literature is a universe with many centers, and one of them is China. The Making of Barbarians offers an account of world literature in which China, as center, produces its own margins. Here Sinologist and comparatist Haun Saussy investigates the meanings of literary translation, adaptation, and appropriation on the boundaries of China long before it came into sustained contact with the West. When scholars talk about comparative literature in Asia, they tend to focus on translation between European languages and Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, as practiced since about 1900. In contrast, Saussy focuses on the period before 1850, when the translation of foreign works into Chinese was rare because Chinese literary tradition overshadowed those around it. The Making of Barbarians looks closely at literary works that were translated into Chinese from foreign languages or resulted from contact with alien peoples. The book explores why translation was such an undervalued practice in premodern China, and how this vast and prestigious culture dealt with those outside it before a new group of foreigners-Europeans-appeared on the horizon. "In The Making of Barbarians, Haun Saussy actually makes us more civilized and enlightened about the eternally nagging question 'What is China?' through a perceptive and informative exploration of its fringes and margins, using all his accustomed intelligence and elegance, subtlety and fluidity. Vive l'esprit de finesse!"-Anne Cheng, Collège de France, Paris "The first book of its kind, The Making of Barbarians ushers us into the immense period of premodern Chinese history, looking at the world inside and outside of China before nation-states. Through intriguing case studies, from Buddhist scriptures and philosophical fables to poetic compositions and even sonic articulations in translation, Haun Saussy tackles issues such as center and periphery, civilization and barbarism, self and others, Sinophilia and xenophobia, and hospitality and hostility. This is a beautiful book."-David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University "Haun Saussy is one of the rare scholars who is able to develop problems that emerge organically from a deep and sustained engagement with premodern Chinese literary texts in ways that are immediately compelling to a larger audience in literary studies and critical theory."-Robert Ashmore, University of California, Berkeley

Stories silenced or sequestered by a century of mass displacement between Europe and the Middle East-recovered and retold at last In 1923, the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange uprooted and swapped nearly two million Christians and Muslims, "pacifying" the so-called Near East through ethnic partition and refugeehood. This imposition of borders not only uprooted peoples from their place in the world; it also displaced many of their stories from a place in world literature. In Literature's Refuge, William Stroebel recovers and weaves together work by fugitive writers, oral storytellers, readers, copyists, editors, and translators dispersed by this massive "unmixing" of populations and the broader border logic that it set in motion. Stroebel argues that two complementary forces emerged as a template for the Eastern Mediterranean's cultural landscape: the modern border, which reshuffled people through a system of filters and checkpoints; and modern philology, which similarly reshuffled their words and works. Philologists and publishers defined modern literature by picking apart, extracting, reformatting, or dispossessing refugee and diasporic texts across a racialized borderscape-a gray zone of semi-inclusion and semi-exclusion, semimobility and immobility. Stroebel reaches into the chinks and crannies of this borderscape to reconstitute the rich textual geography between Greek Orthodoxy and Sunni Islam, between Greek-script, Arabic-script, and Latin-script literary traditions at the edges of Europe and the Middle East. Doing so, he offers a new methodological toolkit for rewriting the modern borderscapes of world literature. William Stroebel is assistant professor of modern Greek and comparative literature at the University of Michigan. "In Literature's Refuge, William Stroebel charts the 'fraught geography of wayward words and alphabets' that persisted after the ethnic and linguistic cleansing of modern Greece and Turkey. Drawing on a range of figures from the world-renowned C. P. Cavafy to forgotten, suppressed, and never-published writers, Stroebel's riveting account should be read by anyone interested in thinking freshly about national literatures, world literature, and the very nature of writing in a migratory age."-David Damrosch, author of Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age "Literature's Refuge is an absolute tour de force. Meticulously researched, written with precision and grace, and engaging with an impressive range of languages, scripts, and media, it takes aim at some of the core assumptions that structure ethnonational, monolingual literary canons in the Eastern Mediterranean. It also draws our attention-thoughtfully and generously-to certain methodological blind spots in the field of comparative literature and in literary studies writ large. Stroebel implicitly invites us all to reexamine the bordering practices in which we often engage in our writing, reading, teaching, and citation practices."-Karen Emmerich, Princeton University "Intellectually exciting and a pleasure to read, Stroebel's book traces a complex geography of texts and their human handlers between Greece and its oriental 'others.' In doing so it unearths an entire intellectual and material borderscape that was lost between Europe and the Middle East, between two racialized regions and indeed two civilizations. By honoring the literature of the excluded and the marginal, the linguistic outcasts, and the dispossessed, Stroebel asks anew two fundamental questions: What is literature? And what is Greek?"-Konstantina Zanou, Columbia University "This book makes a groundbreaking contribution to the fields of world literature, comparative literature, critical migration/refugee studies, and modern Greek and Turkish studies, as it proposes a highly original reframing and radical rethinking of central premises in some of these fields. With an impressively thorou

How Arabic influenced the evolution of vernacular literatures and anticolonial thought in Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference offers a new understanding of Arabic's global position as the basis for comparing cultural and literary histories in countries separated by vast distances. By tracing controversies over the use of Arabic in three countries with distinct colonial legacies, Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal, the book presents a new approach to the study of postcolonial literatures, anticolonial nationalisms, and the global circulation of pluralist ideas. Annette Damayanti Lienau presents the largely untold story of how Arabic, often understood in Africa and Asia as a language of Islamic ritual and precolonial commerce, assumed a transregional role as an anticolonial literary medium in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining how major writers and intellectuals across several generations grappled with the cultural asymmetries imposed by imperial Europe, Lienau shows that Arabic-as a cosmopolitan, interethnic, and interreligious language-complicated debates over questions of indigeneity, religious pluralism, counter-imperial nationalisms, and emerging nation-states. Unearthing parallels from West Africa to Southeast Asia, Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference argues that debates comparing the status of Arabic to other languages challenged not only Eurocentric but Arabocentric forms of ethnolinguistic and racial prejudice in both local and global terms. Annette Damayanti Lienau is assistant professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. "Highlighting the complex entanglement of language, race, and religion, this brilliant book illuminates an entire anticolonial framework for comparative literature. From Egypt to Indonesia to Senegal, Lienau draws our attention to the sacred and secular valences of the Arabic language across transregional communities. Powerful, imaginative, and inspiring-a transformative rethinking of the grounds of world literary study."-Michael Allan, University of Oregon "Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference is a fascinating and important study of a global Arabophone literature that served as a crucial marker of Muslim identity and asserted belonging to Islamic culture for colonial subjects from sub-Saharan West Africa to Southeast Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This ambitious book substantially expands the horizons of global Arabic as an essential modern literary language."-Karla Mallette, University of Michigan "Combining a broad linguistic range and exciting methodological innovations, Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference is a compelling, original, and insightful book that meticulously unfolds a new understanding of global Arabic as a space of comparison."-Tobias Warner, University of California, Davis "For Lienau, the idea that Arabic is a closed language, resisting translation by virtue of its status as the Islamic language of prophetic revelation, is manifestly belied by the modern history of Arabic and its relation to literatures across cultural and linguistic divides. . . . [Lienau] forcefully illustrates that the Orientalist position of Islam's antagonism toward diversity and Quranic Arabic's essential untranslatability are rooted not in historical fact but racist fantasy."---Henry Clements, Public Books