The first issue of the newly reinvented CR, published in May—just
in time for the 45th anniversary of the original journal—was marked
by seriousness of purpose and savvy writing on the Americas by some
of the field's most distinguished and original writers.
The second issue was published earlier this fall. The journal has been
nominated for the Phoenix Award of the Council of Editors of Learned
Journals.
Johnson says this undertaking—a collaboration between two Great
Lakes' universities—is expected to help define their role as key
institutions in the emerging field of hemispheric and global Americas
studies.
"The journal provides us with an international forum or platform, not
so much for our own writing," he says, "as for our vision of what comparative
Americas studies should be. It gives us the opportunity to help determine
the field."
"It is our hope," he adds, "that The New Centennial Review will
disseminate this material and do for UB and MSU what Diacritics
has done for Cornell or Critical Inquiry has done for the University
of Chicago—reinforce our identities as important locations for
innovative Americas cultural and literary studies.
"In the long run, CR should help various departments at UB recruit
faculty members, graduate students and funding sources with an interest
in rethinking the foundations and limits of the Americas," Johnson notes.
Although published by Michigan State University Press and heavily financed
by Michigan State's College of Arts and Sciences, the journal is distinguished
by UB affiliation from top to bottom.
Its two editors, for instance, are longtime friends and colleagues
who both hold doctorates from the UB Department of English, co-edited
"Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics" (University of Minnesota
Press 1997) and have co-authored "Anthropology's Wake: After Cultural
Analysis" (forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press).
One of the journal's three distinguished editorial advisory boards
is comprised of 13 members of the faculty of the UB College of Arts
and Sciences, another of 14 members of the MSU faculty. Three former
graduate students from the UB Department of Comparative Literature,
now faculty members at major educational institutions, contributed to
the first issue, and the second issue includes essays presented at UB's
March 2000 conference, "Borders of the Americas."
One of next year's issues, says Johnson, will feature material presented
in November at the Pan American Symposium sponsored by the UB Department
of Modern Languages and Literatures.
Another issue will support UB's intellectual commitment to Cuba by
translating and publishing essays from important Cuban journals from
the 1940s and '50s, including works by José Lezama Lima, Cintio
Vitier and Antón Arrufat.
Considerable financial support for that issue has been provided by
three of UB's endowed chairs: the David Gray Chair in Poetry (Charles
Bernstein), the Eugenio Donato Chair in Comparative Literature (Rodolphe
Gasché) and the James McNulty Chair in English (Dennis Tedlock).
In addition to the enthusiasm and support of its new editors, editorial
boards and contributors, CR gets a strong leg up from its original
incarnation.
In the years since its founding in 1957, the journal has published
important critical and theoretical scholarship concerning the humanities.
Its contributors included Russell Nye, Talcott Parsons and Edward Said,
author of "Orientalism," widely considered the founding text of postcolonial
studies. For Centennial Review, Said provided the first translations
from Eric Auerbach's classic work, "Mimesis."
The journal began to flounder in the 1970s and '80s as the field of
theoretical and critical literary studies changed. Although it continued
to publish, the journal lost not only significant readership, but also
its direction and many of its identifiable traits.
"In the meantime," says Michaelsen, "the MSU Department of English
created in 1997 what we believe is the first Ph.D. program in the literatures
of the Americas. I realized at that time that although some journals
are interested in the Americas and others in interdisciplinary studies,
none focused exclusively on the Americas in an interdisciplinary context."
When the editor of The New Centennial Review became ill, Johnson
and Michaelsen proposed to the dean of the MSU College of Arts and Sciences
that they take over editorial leadership and reinvent the publication
and its mission. Their efforts resulted in its emergence this year as
a theoretically inflected interdisciplinary journal of the Americas.
The first issue of the re-named and freshly designed CR was dedicated
to the concept of cultural citizenship. Is soccer revolutionary, its
contributors asked. When does a "mole" fly? Is there nothing to the
myth of globalization? Is Kafka Canadian?
Issue 1.1 included essays by such noted scholars as Donald Pease, director
of the Dartmouth College Institute in American Studies and general series
editor of "New Americanists" at Duke University Press, and Ohio State
University's Ileana Rodríguez, distinguished for her astute readings
of Latin-American "politically committed" literature-texts produced
within the context of Latin-American guerrilla movements.
Scott Cutler Shershow of Miami University, Ohio, looked at manifestations
of myth and nihilism that emerge in the discourse of globalization.
Grant Farred of Duke University wrote about "colouredness" and citizenship
in post-Apartheid South Africa.
University of Miami Americanist Russ Castronovo, who has written provocatively
on politics, ideology and history in American literature and society,
employed Eli‡n Gonzales and the 19th-century fictional mulatto protagonist
Iola Leroy to trace the complex maps of identity that produce "reluctant
citizens" of one group or another.
"As the first issue suggested," says Johnson, "CR is devoted
to comparative studies of the Americas that articulate possibilities
for plural futures that are not reiterations of its past.
"We're looking for philosophically inflected interventions, provocations
and insurgencies that trouble the limits of the potentialities of the
Americas. We also encourage more global and theoretical work with implications
for the Americas."
For information about CR: The New Centennial Review, go to www.msupress.msu.edu/journals/cr.
