“With You is My Life, with You My Death.” With these Words, the American Missionary Rev. William Richards Placed Himself Under the protection of the ‘aha’ ōlelo, a Hawaiian chiefly council composed of the highest-ranking ali'i in the Sandwich Islands. On the afternoon of 26 November 1827, Richards defended himself before the ‘aha against a charge of libel brought by the English consul, Richard Charlton. Charlton had argued with Richards over a letter the minister had written to his Boston-based employers, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). The letter, written in October 1825, contained the news that an English captain, William Buckle, had purchased a Hawaiian woman from a chiefess. The problem was not the letter itself but the fact that it had been made public, through American newspapers. It would take the news two years to make its way back to the islands from New England, a world two oceans and six months’ sail away. The purchase of the woman, according to Charlton, was slavery and constituted a violation of British piracy law (qtd. in Richards, Letter to Evarts, 6 Dec. 1827). When Richards refused to sign an oath swearing to the veracity of his letter, Charlton accused the missionary of libel. Now both parties had come before the ‘aha ‘ōlelo to argue their cases. The question before the chiefs was whether or not the American Richards should be turned over to Charlton to face the charge in front of an English jury.

Predicting any future—or futures—for literary criticism is a risky business, perhaps all the more so now that the relation of literature to its others is arguably subject to greater and faster changes than ever before. The changes to come in literary criticism will be determined by transformations in literature proper as well as by any number of forces outside literature. By changes “within” literature we cannot mean simply those to contemporary or recent literature, whose canons—to say nothing of what exceeds these canons—are far from settled. The literary past continues to change even if every given text endlessly repeats itself like a broken record. For an authoritative formulation of this position, one need not turn to some outré poststructuralist or to Walter Benjamin's contention that even the dead are not “safe” from the reaches of the present (“On the Concept” 391). One can appeal to the sober, usually conservative thinking of T. S. Eliot:

All my feeling for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick comes from her writing. I wasn't a friend. I never met her or even heard her give a public lecture or present a paper. The closest we came was being bound together, one after the other, in the same edited anthology, my essay on sequence and precedence in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and its various adaptations following an extract from her A Dialogue on Love. If Sedgwick's essay and mine can be said to speak to each other, to strike a conversational pose, as though the breadth of a page might be mistaken for the more sociable span of a bar or table, it is only to point up the spuriousness of this effect. For whatever weight of significance the closing section of Sedgwick's essay might seem to license my finding in this happenstance—“I don't resist … secretly fingering this enigmatic pebble. I can't quite figure out what makes its meaning for me” (“Dialogue” 351)—is made implausible with the page's turn by the brutalist facade of my first sentence: “Sequence is its own alibi” (352).

Walking Through an Exhibit Takes Time: Time to Navigate the Museum Building, Time to Encounter Objects on Display That Witnessed times long past, or time to reflect on the relations among the presented past, the experienced present, and an imaginative future. Eliciting historical and aesthetic affect, museums are ineluctably bound up with temporalities—of viewing, of display, and of representation.

A set of major old-master paintings looted from Spanish Royal Collections, including important canvases by Velázquez (fig. 1), Correggio, and others, was discovered in Joseph Bonaparte's baggage, abandoned along with the rest of his property as he fled from the Battle of Vitoria, which ended his tumultuous five-year reign as king of Spain in 1813. Years later the duke of Wellington offered to return the collection to the restored monarch. But Ferdinand VII—who owed his throne to the duke's victories—refused to take it. What in its day would have been called the return to legitimacy, the restoration of the Bourbon line after the defeat of Napoléon, did not result in the restitution of Napoleonic loot. The works remain at Apsley House, the duke's home in London, where they have been on display in the Waterloo Gallery since 1819, a usurper's booty transformed by its history into an emblem of royal generosity, gratitude, and military prowess (fig. 2). The collection is now part of the museum officially established at the duke's residence in 1947, following another European military cataclysm in which Britain prevailed.

The Sea is Not a Metaphor. Figurative Language has its Place in Analyses of the Maritime World, Certainly, But Oceanic studies could be more invested in the uses, and problems, of what is literal in the face of the sea's abyss of representation. The appeal that figures of oscillation and circulation have had is easy to understand, since the sea, in William Boelhower's formulation, “leaves no traces, and has no place names, towns or dwelling places; it cannot be possessed.” Boelhower's description of the Atlantic world is representative of characterizations of the ocean in recent critical work: it is “fundamentally a space of dispersion, conjunction, distribution, contingency, heterogeneity, and of intersecting and stratified lines and images—in short, a field of strategic possibilities in which the Oceanic order holds all together in a common but highly fluid space” (92-93). The ready availability—and undeniable utility—of fluidity as an oceanic figure means that the actual sea has often been rendered immaterial in transnational work, however usefully such work formulates the ethos of transnationalism and oceanic studies alike. In this essay I advocate a practice of oceanic studies that is attentive to the material conditions and praxis of the maritime world, one that draws from the epistemological structures provided by the lives and writings of those for whom the sea was simultaneously workplace, home, passage, penitentiary, and promise. This would allow for a galvanization of the erasure, elision, and fluidity at work in the metaphorics of the sea that would better enable us to see and to study the work of oceanic literature.

In 2001, the official year of the “life sciences” in germany, ottmar ette began pulling together ideas for what was to become the programmatic essay excerpted and translated here. Ette is known for different things in different places: in Spain and Hispanic America, he is renowned for his work on José Martí, Jorge Semprún, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, and a host of other authors. In the francophone world, he is best known for his writings on Roland Barthes and, more recently, on Amin Maalouf, while his reputation in his native Germany rests on his voluminous work on Alexander von Humboldt and on the new literatures in German. That this polyglot professor of Romance literatures is, at heart and in practice, a comparatist goes almost without saying. He is also, perhaps as inevitably, a literary theorist and a cultural critic, whose work has attracted attention throughout Europe. In his 2004 book ÜberLebenswissen—a title that might be rendered in English both as “Knowledge for Survival” and as “About Life Knowledge”—Ette first began to reclaim for literary studies the dual concepts of Lebenswissen and Lebenswissenschaft, which I have translated provisionally as “knowledge for living” and “science for living” to set them off from the biotechnological discourses of the life sciences. While ÜberLebenswissen focuses on the disciplinary history and practices of the field of Romance literatures, its companion volume from 2005, ZwischenWeltenSchreiben: Literaturen ohne festen Wohnsitz (“Writing between Worlds: Literatures without a Fixed Abode”), extends Ette's inquiry to the global contexts of Shoah, Cuban, and Arab American literatures. Both volumes urge that literary studies “be opened up, made accessible and relevant, to the larger society. Doing so is, simply and plainly, a matter of survival” (ZwischenWeltenSchreiben 270).

I'm Writing this Essay on a Green Hermes 3000 Manual Typewriter from the 1950s. A Painting Student Gave it to Me; He found it on the street.

I imagine telling Eve about this typewriter. She would have understood how a material instrument—ink-flecked platen, jade-pale space bar—can change syntax: to looms and to Victorian textures her sentences responded, and I recognize, in her prose's rhythms, the period-specific thrill of stretched syntax, and the renunciatory satisfaction of curtailing a clause before it can exercise its right to conclude.

Although, in a self-deprecatory moment, she claimed to disregard music, I often fantasized about inviting her to my apartment for an evening musicale. On my Steinway M piano, I'd play a harmonically indecisive piece from Proust's era—a Fauré impromptu. She'd forgive my technical deficiencies; she'd comment on the performance's abreactive ambition (she taught me the word abreactive), my attempt to neutralize shame by exulting in it, my finger labor a haptic game affiliated with her favored arts—masturbating, interpreting, containing, hugging, sitting, retreating.

This Essay Took Shape in an Encounter with Bones: With Curving, Darkened Skeletons Propped on Shelves or Hanging Suspended in white cases. They are displays of tuberculosis, scoliosis, and osteomalacia (rickets) in the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh (figs. 1 and 2). With bowed bones and spinal columns twisted into seemingly impossible shapes, the skeletons give the fantastic illusion of having been caught in mid-swirl in their cases, frail objects blown by invisible winds. A few of the bones of the feet at some point dropped off one of the skeletons with rickets. They were reattached with small and now faded ribbons.

Eve's Tenure at Amherst—She Taught in the English Department from 1984 TO 1988—Coincided with the Tenth Anniversary of coeducation at the college and the early years of the AIDS pandemic. She found on her arrival a culture that had neither fully welcomed its female students and faculty members nor begun to acknowledge its homophobia. Eve gave early on a witty and provocative lecture to the campus community called “Sabrina Doesn't Live Here Anymore,” which enlisted as a feminist icon a nude female statue that had been glorified and abused throughout its long association with Amherst. Known today mostly by Eve's former colleagues and students (and the occasional still-disgruntled alumnus), the talk catalyzed campus activism and lead ultimately to the founding of the Women's and Gender Studies Department, perhaps the first in the country to adopt that compound name. Those familiar with Eve's later work may be surprised by her lecture's full-throated feminism—Between Men had yet to appear, and queer theory was hardly a gleam in anyone's eye. Even after a quarter century, however, its inventiveness and turnings of phrase could be mistaken for no one else's. Readers of PMLA may appreciate particularly the opening section of the talk, reproduced below, for the window it provides onto an academic culture then on the brink of transformation. It also powerfully conveys, beyond any reminiscence I could provide, what Eve sounded like the moment I first heard her speak in public.

Familiar Landscapes are Today Challenged by Illicit Sea Journeys. The Southern Shores of Occidental Modernity are beached by the uninvited guest, by the arrival of histories and cultures that exceed its desires and augment its fears. Like a nemesis from the sea, the interrogative presence of the migrant, who announces planetary processes that are not ours to manage and define, draws Europe and the rest of the West to the threshold of a modernity that exceeds itself. In Isaac Julien's video installation Western Union: Small Boats (2007), the cruel passage of northward migration—across the inhospitable desert and perilous sea—proposes a dramatic poetics that seeks to force apart the conclusive framings of existing political, cultural, and historical narratives. Contorted black bodies gasping in the foam, abandoned on the beach in silver body bags among the sunbathers or writhing on the palace floors of European hierarchies replay the black Atlantic, memories of slavery, and racial oppression in the modern-day Mediterranean.

There is no More Sea Power. What Kind of Awe can a Fleet or an Aircraft Carrier inspire in the Nuclear Age, Whose Blasts have given a new character to military majesty and sublimity and whose marine vehicles are hidden beneath the waves? Nor do the ocean-girding voyages of global commerce offer a sense of majesty, the neat stacks of containers rising high above the decks being mere floating versions of the endless stacks at the prosaic, crane-filled ports of Busan, Long Beach, Elizabeth, or Singapore. The sea is full of transport, labor, and industry, but spectacle has moved elsewhere: what remains of the nautical in the visual media is the nostalgic sublimity of sinking ships or historical reenactments of blue-water glory. As if to underscore this vacuum of hegemonic maritime power in an age of shock and awe, the pirates of Puntland and Sulu still have their way in the Gulf of Aden and the Strait of Malacca, as they have for centuries. Latter-day posturing by the epigones of interstate maritime power contenders approaches farce, as in the struggle for the Arctic, joined by Russia, Canada, the United States, Denmark, and Norway, punctuated by Russian flags at the bottom of the sea and by the specter of Danish military incursion into what Canada claims as its sovereign territory (Craciun).

In what is of late one of the most quoted passages in American Letters, W. E. B. Dubois describes the Double Consciousness that makes the Negro “a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world” (5). Paradoxically, given the visual logic of his accounting, the very power of DuBois's notion has obscured the incident whose recounting generates it. Describing his boyhood initiation into racial self-knowledge in his early life “as a little thing, away up in the hills of New England … in a wee wooden school-house,” DuBois focuses on a moment in which he and his schoolmates splurge on “gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange.” The social ritual is “merry” until an authoritative onlooker, a “tall girl, a newcomer,” “refused my card— refused it peremptorily, with a glance” (4). At this precise moment, we're meant to believe, the boy's individualist faith in character as destiny is “forever shattered” (Lewis 33). With the girl's refusal, “the shadow swept across me”; “it dawned upon me that I was different from the others, … shut out from their world by a vast veil” (DuBois 4).

Leo Bersani's contributions to Queer Theory have been essentially traumatic. Ever since “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” with its startling opening sentence (“There is a big secret about sex: most people don't like it” [197]), Bersani's writing on sexuality has disrupted the conceptual coordinates of queer theory, a field that officially welcomes the disruptive. What has made Bersani hard to assimilate is less his psychoanalytic emphasis on the ineluctable masochism of sexuality (a principal reason for the aversion to sex) than his insistent conceptualization of sexuality in aesthetic terms. Although his work has never shied from the rebarbative aspects of erotic life, it is, in fact, Bersani's speculations about relationality as irreducibly aesthetic that have proved tougher for the field of queer theory to countenance. (Queer theorists take sexual variance in stride; we have a harder time dealing with art.) It is not merely that Bersani draws examples from literature, painting, sculpture, and cinema when discussing erotic relationality. More fundamentally, his earlier work claimed that art has effects on the human subject akin to those of sexuality, while his later writing proposes a specifically aesthetic subjectivity—rather than the sexual kind—as the preferred basis for relating to the world beyond the self.

“Mon Dieu! quel succès!” such was the response of the Moroccan novelist, poet, and sociologist AbdelkéBir Khatibi (1938–2009) when he learned that his 1974 study of the “intersemiotics” of the Islamic body, La blessure du nom propre (“The Wound of the Proper Name”), which dealt, in part, with the monotheistic interdiction against tattoos, had inspired a reader to get a tattoo (Langue 15). While one might be tempted to interpret this remark merely as Khatibi's vindication of the affective powers of his writing, it in fact reveals an important element of his critical-literary practice: his way of bringing deconstruction to bear on the tasks of decolonization. The curious case of the tattooed reader illustrates how, by deconstructing holy writ's apparent desire “to erase in a single palimpsestic gesture all later writing, especially that which is traced on the body” (Blessure 66), Khatibi helped create the conditions for somebody else to perform an act of auto-bio-graphy, understood as a form of mental and corporeal decolonization.