In the past twenty-five years, no theoretical conception has summed up the complexity of the colonial experience, and the possibilities of its interpretation, as well as Homi K. Bhabha's “hybridity.” “he sign of the productivity of colonial power,” but also the “name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal,” hybridity exposes the uncomfortable state in which colonial culture settled and expanded and, today, continues to beleaguer the state of being “postcolonial” (Bhabha 112). Signiied by the “discovery of the book,” hegemony was marked by the miracle of an object that was at once authoritative and unknowable, one that the supposedly unlettered native could hold in reverent hands (102). In the dark space of the native's hands and narrated within a native register, however, the “colonial text emerges uncertainly” (107). he intent to civilize and anglicize a body of social, religious, and aesthetic practices in the colony, then, is adulterated, perhaps even unconsciously resisted, once it is disseminated by way of the seemingly irrefutable book.

Google Ngram Viewer reports that usage of the word interrogation has been climbing steadily since 1942. liberals will of course argue, not without force, that the George W. Bush administration's embrace of “enhanced interrogation” (i.e., torture) drove the recent steady rise. To that sound point one might, however, also advance a less palatable observation: that representatives of the academy were in the interrogation room, doing the interrogating, long before the Bush administration got into the act.

whoosh, hum. Imagine that sound, like an air vent cycling on. It circulates fresh air, the fresh air of poems that breathe into our lungs, whether we are standing in the Titian Room at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum or reading the poems on a porch, looking out on a summer day. You will not find a description of that sound in the pages of Susan Howe's book Debths, only the phrase “Titian Air Vent.” Its rush of phonemes energizes the whole. he verbal rhythms and the visual patterns respond to its acoustic energy, pulsating across the different parts of the book, creating not so much a hierarchy of theories or subtexts as an interlocking and interwoven set of patterns that spread out on every page—in irregular or fragmentary form, in neat prose paragraphs, and in blocks of verse. In Debths, where so much depends on sound orchestration, verbal transformations, and visual arrangements, the networks connecting sight and sound are always being tightened, loosened, playfully intensified. Whole, rhythm, hierarchy, network. These are Caroline Levine's terms, here embedded in my account of Debths. What might a book like Howe's, drawing on many aesthetic modes but built on the foundation of poetry, ask of Levine's Forms, a remarkable theoretical intervention whose many examples are nearly all narrative?

The challenge facing “distant reading” has less to do with Franco Moretti's assertion that we must learn “how not to read” than with his implication that looking should take the place of reading. Not reading is the dirty open secret of all literary critics-there will always be that book (or those books) that you should have read, have not read, and probably won't read. Moretti is not endorsing a disinterest in reading either, like that reported in the 2004 National Endowment for the Arts' Reading at Risk, which notes that less than half the adult public in the United States read a work of literature in 2002 (3). In his “little pact with the devil” that substitutes patterns of devices, themes, tropes, styles, and parts of speech for thousands or millions of texts at a time, the devil is the image: trees, networks, and maps-spatial rather than verbal forms representing a textual corpus that disappears from view. In what follows, I consider Distant Reading as participating in the ut pictura poesis tradition-that is, the Western tradition of viewing poetry and painting as sister arts-to explain how ingrained our resistances are to Moretti's formalist approach. I turn to more recent interart examples to suggest interpretive alternatives to formalism for distant-reading methods.

I want to thank Wai Chee Dimock for initiating this forum and my agile interlocutors for responding to my work. In the final chapter of The Limits of Critique, I talk about reading as an act of cocreation and composition—a practice of thinking and feeling with, rather than against, a text. Such a vision of what it means to read is amply confirmed in these generous and generative essays.

Sarah Beckwith is almost preternaturally attuned to what I am trying to do in The Limits of Critique, to the extent of conveying my ideas better than I do myself. She glosses postcritical, for example, as meaning that “we come after critique and through it rather than that we have dispensed with it, though that meaning will surely be ascribed to her.” Nailed on both counts. I appreciate her attentiveness to how I write: to mood and disposition as being fundamentally a matter of form as well as content. I am not sure whether the style of The Limits of Critique is my voice—it is a way of writing I adopted for a specific purpose that may or may not appear again—but it seemed crucial, in tackling a book about critique's limits, to aim for a tone that was playful rather than censorious—or at least playfully censorious.

Recently, some literary critics have proposed that we might relate to texts in a different way than we're used to. Instead of plunging into critique, plumbing a text's depths, or coolly analyzing its symptoms, instead of “digging down and standing back,” as Rita Felski puts it, critics might adopt a less skeptical, less paranoid— less critical—stance. We might attend to a text's surfaces, in Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus's terms. We might get “close but not deep,” as Heather Love suggests. We might practice a new formalism, neither naive nor nostalgic but keyed to the aesthetic and the political.

Several years ago, the first thing i learned in my introductory statistics class was the following declaration, which the instructor had written in capital letters on the blackboard: “all models are wrong.” Models are statistical, graphic, or physical objects, and their primary quality is that they can be manipulated. Scientists and social scientists use them to think about the social or natural worlds and to represent those worlds in a simplified manner. Statistical models, which dominate the social sciences, particularly in economics, are typically equations with response and predictor variables. Specifically, a researcher seeks to understand some social phenomenon, such as the relation between students' scores on a math test and how many hours the students spent preparing for the exam. To predict or describe this relation, the researcher constructs a quantitative model with quantitative inputs (the number of hours each student spent studying) and outputs (each student's test score). The researcher hopes that the number of hours a student spent preparing for the exam will correlate with the student's score. If it does, this quantified relation can help describe the overall dynamics of test taking.

According to Isaac Julien, the director of Black Skin, White Mask, a film imagining the life of Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha is presented in a nonspeaking role as a colored, racialized “colonial subject” to lend “texture” to the cinematography (Interview). Unlike the eloquent postcolonial critics Stuart Hall and Françoise Vergès, who are interviewed extensively in the ilm, the mute Bhabha is a cipher, a visual trace of diference in the philosophical, cinematic, and audio montage that composes Julien's meditation on decolonization (Frantz Fanon [Director's cut]). In many ways, Julien's Fanon seems indebted to Bhabha's strong reading, against the grain of Fanon's oeuvre, in “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition,” a foreword Bhabha wrote for a new British edition of Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1986. Julien's Fanon is an interstitial igure, stitched together through multiple viewpoints and physically composed of cinematic elements juxtaposed in striking contrast to one another. He emerges from scraps of discourse cast of and reassembled, much as Bhabha's Fanon is captured in Fanon's ungrammatical utterance that betrays by ellipsis the nature of identity, which is that identity is “not”: “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man” (113). The revelation that the nature of identity is spatially split and temporally deferred-the deinition of Derridean diférance-is most truly represented in the colonial situation, where white mythologies of wholeness and authenticity are actualized as performances of power. When these mythologies are accompanied by paranoid fantasies of blackness that reveal the contradictory duplicity of white representations of the other-the simian Negro, the inscrutable Chinaman-this racial discrimination and its neurotic imagery reveal the nature of the white self and its pretense of universality: that the human is not whole and that the Enlightenment dream of self-presence is an illusion thrown up by the anxious exercise of mastery over those lesser humans, the Negroes.

The title The Location of Culture suggests that the book's author, Homi K. Bhabha, places an overriding importance on a culture's spatial and geographic situation. Lest Bhabha's readers get too fixated on culture's site and locality, however, the title's emphasis on place is soon qualified by an epigraph from the book's most-cited author, Frantz Fanon, that emphasizes temporality: “The architecture of this work is rooted in the temporal. Every human problem must be considered from the standpoint of time” (qtd. in Bhabha xiv). So, while culture must be located, the architecture of The Location of Culture is rooted in the temporal. The place and time of its moments of production are affirmed throughout its essays with a wealth of contemporary references and opening comments like “In Britain, in the 1980s …” (27). No book of theory is more self-consciously embedded in its own space and time. The Location of Culture, published in 1994, is a very English book, written from within the political, cultural, and intellectual world of the London of the 1980s and early 1990s, in which migrant activists from the Caribbean and South Asia such as Bhabha, Salman Rushdie, and Stuart Hall were challenging the verities of a long-established, socialist, masculinist, English intellectual and political culture. The brilliant innovation of The Location of Culture was to create a new language, a new articulation and understanding of minority positions—which is why the response to it has been so overwhelming, from academics, artists, and many others. The work that went into The Location of Culture was intimately related to Bhabha's own milieu and time: the book is the product of his decennium mirabile in London.

It is such an honor to have Forms chosen for a special feature in PMLA, and I am grateful for the time and energy these scholars put into their thoughtful responses. Taken together, these contributions point to three core questions that divide us in the field today: What is politics? How should we understand agency? And what is the value and purpose of literature and literary studies?

“I hope my attitude will not be regarded as irreverent,” Maurizio Ascari declares before launching into a critique of Franco Moretti's critical methods (3). By contrast, I undertake no critique of Moretti's methods, but my attitude toward his work is at least somewhat irreverent, if also appreciative. I titled an early draft of this essay “Distant Reading and the New Poetics of Enchantment; or, Toward a Literary History That Is Spiritual but Not Religious.” This title was self-consciously outrageous, since there is little that is overtly enchanted, let alone spiritual, about Moretti's criticism. Indeed, one of the recurring rhetorical fillips in his book Distant Reading involves the disparagement of close reading as a kind of theology: “At bottom,” close reading is “a theological exercise—very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously—whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let's learn how not to read them. Distant reading: where distance … is a condition of knowledge” (48; see also 33, 67, 89, and 113). By invoking enchantment and spirituality to describe his work, then, I was looking to underscore, a little cheekily, how rigorous engagement with his “pact with the devil” reveals similar features to those Moretti partly discredits—namely, credulity, “superstition” (Johnson 84), and “mystery” (Goodwin xiii). In essence, my aim was to employ close reading—of distant reading—as a kind of return, if not revenge, of the repressed.

This cluster of essays stems from the spring reception workshop on autoexoticism, which was organized by the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Programme (OCCT) and the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA) and took place on 19 March 2015 at the University of Oxford. Speakers at the workshop, also the contributors to this special feature, had been discussing the question of exoticism for the past few months. The topic of autoexoticism emerged through our discussions, and we felt the need to explore it because we were dissatisfied with the status quo of criticism on exoticism and intercultural practices. These essays are therefore both the result of our attempt to rethink exoticism and its discourses by articulating the autoexotic and an invitation to further explore and problematize the topic.

In nineteenth-century france, the so-called province, denoting everything outside Paris, was considered a foreign land by Parisian writers, who often constructed it as an exotic space. When we deal with this kind of provincial exoticism, however, considering this perspective alone risks painting an incomplete picture of the French literary field. Through the example of Samuel-Henri Berthoud, an author from the north of France, my intention here is to shed light on autoexoticist practices by indigenous provincial writers and to explore how they actively reclaimed, fostered, and enhanced exotic constructions about their provinces. Indeed, a wealth of evidence supports my argument that their acceptance of hegemonic constructions from the dominant culture was not passive but rather an active and creative reappropriation. This essay also challenges the idea of a stable hegemonic cultural center around which the marginal authors and literary works gravitate. Before tackling these issues, let us take a step back and briefly survey the particular value of provincial France at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

My first encounter with Franco Moretti's work was “conjectures on world literature,” from which his book distant reading takes its title. The essay was first published in 2000 in the New Left Review, the original home of seven of the ten essays reprinted in Distant Reading. I happened across it in 2004 amid a fit of procrastination fueled by anxious uncertainty. I was unsure about how, or even whether, to revise a dissertation on popular novels in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany, many of which had been translated from the French. No one really knew much about them. They were miserably cataloged; generations of Prussian librarians had been ordered not to collect them—and to throw away any that had managed to take up shelf space in the first place. In 1795 the reactionary, antirepublican Johann Georg Heinzmann opined, “So lange die Welt stehet, sind keine Erscheinungen so merkwürdig gewesen als in Deutschland die Romanleserey und in Frankreich die Revolution” (“Since the beginning of time nothing was more noteworthy than the revolution in France and the reading of novels in Germany”; 139; my trans.). But an awful lot of these novels are now gone. Critics sometimes say they were read to shreds. And whereas Heinzmann—and generations of state and church censors before him—cared a great deal about the republican potential of German Romanleserey (“reading of novels”), I wasn't confident anyone did today.

Much has been written about Stein's politics ever since it was revealed, in 1996, that Stein had translated many of Philippe Pétain's speeches (Burns and Dydo, “Gertrude Stein”; Van Dusen). If some critics accuse Stein of collaboration with Vichy France, others defend her by pointing out contradictory evidence regarding her behavior during the war years. Barbara Will, in Unlikely Collaboration; Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay, and the Vichy Dilemma (2011), casts Stein in the role of pro-Vichy thinker whose support of Pétain was “heartfelt and dogged” (118). In addition to translating Pétain's speeches, Stein was a close friend of Bernard Fay, who, as head of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, was an official high up in the administration of Vichy France. Charles Bernstein, Edward Burns, and Joan Retallack take up Stein's defense in jacket2's online dossier Gertrude Stein's War Years; Setting the Record Straight (2012). They argue that no conclusive evidence ties Stein explicitly to Vichy France (Burns) and highlight the irony in some of her statements—for instance, that Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace Prize (Bernstein, “Gertrude Stein”; Retallack). Furthermore, Stein published her writing in both the Vichy-sponsored magazine Patrie (“Fatherland”) and the anti-Nazi and anti-Vichy journals Confluences, Fontaine (“Fountain”), and L'arbalète (“The Cross-Bow”) during the war years (Burns and Dydo, “Three Lives”; Burns). She sympathizes with the French maquis in her postwar memoir Wars I Have Seen and writes about the inner workings of the Resistance in her play In Savoy; or, Yes Is for a Very Young Man (Wagner-Martin).

George Moses Horton (1797?-1883?) is one of three African Americans known to have published poetry while enslaved in colonial north America or the United States. The recently discovered holograph manuscript of “Individual Influence” is the only available evidence that Horton also wrote short essays. Written in 1855 or 1856 and published here for the first time, “Individual Influence” provides a new perspective on Horton's writing process, his strategic affiliations in Chapel Hill, and his changing ideas about the relative efficacy of political and divine influence. More generally, the essay expands the available archive of writing by enslaved African Americans.