Our concept of racial formation was advanced in 1986 as a critique of prevailing notions of race in the social sciences. We challenged approaches that treated race as epiphenomenal to supposedly more fundamental axes of stratification and difference: ethnicity, class, and nation. But we were disappointed—depressed, in fact—by the reception our analysis received. Some years would pass before our approach was seriously taken up by sociologists, political scientists, and other social science scholars. What kept our spirits buoyed during this period was the surprising discovery that our work was resonating with scholars in other disciplines, most notably in history, law, and literary studies. We learned much and greatly profited from these newfound colleagues' engagement with our work, from the ways they creatively extended our concept of racial formation, and from their advancement of new ways to think about the ongoing evolution of racism and its multiple dimensions.

An onomatopoeic expression automatically entails the specification of what is being described. A pattering sound cannot come from a piece of wood. But when I was listening to [Peter Ablinger's Berlin sound] recordings, I sometimes couldn't tell whether a sound was coming from thunder or a sheet of metal. I wanted to represent the sound, not the person who was producing it, nor its metaphorical significance. It took me quite some time to come up with a solution: My solution was not to find a solution, but rather to enter into the crevice between sound and language and make countless little notes.

—Yoko Tawada, “The Art of Being Synchronous”

In The unbearable lightness of being, Milan Kundera, a writer in diaspora, puts Sabina, a painter in diaspora, in the position of the artist facing the imposition of a ready-made identity. Kundera writes:

Nothing is more remarkable in the tradition of Althusserian Marxism than the silence that has dogged the work of Juan Carlos Rodríguez. One thinks of the relative importance attached to the work of Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson. Some might believe the discrepancy is a matter of merit rather than of willful or unconscious neglect. But even the most casual comparison of Rodríguez's Theory and History of Ideological Production with Eagleton's Criticism and Ideology (1975) and with Jameson's The Political Unconscious (1981) suggests that this can hardly be the case. The parallel with Jameson is particularly intriguing. Like Rodríguez, the North American scholar accepts Louis Althusser's view of the social totality as a “decentered structure” in which various levels develop in “relative autonomy” and in which different feudal and capitalist matrices coexist. Also like Rodríguez, he considers literary works to be a form of ideological discourse that represses historical truth. Why, then, the silence that surrounds Rodríguez? The answer lies in the extent to which Jameson's work recontains diverse critical positions in the larger horizon of Marxism. Such a practice, as Eagleton has argued, is congenial to a dominant American pragmatism and eclecticism, as are the presiding Marxist Hegelian categories of reification and commodification (60–62). The consequences, politically, are found in Jameson's amorphous brand of “alliance” politics. The material situation of Rodríguez was very different. Given the militancy of the working class in Spain, his presiding categories were those of exploitation and class conflict, which combine to form the basis of a revolutionary proletarian politics that is anything but acceptable to the North American academy.

Who would want to read an essay titled “Writing Christianity”? “Writing Judaism” might by now sound a bit dated, given that Jewish subject matter is the domain of some of this country's greatest novelists and poets. “Writing Buddhism” still has an appealing ring to it. “Writing Islam” as a topic would not sound interesting to most Muslim authors in Muslim societies. In fact, “Writing Islam” could sound like a fundamentalist ploy to corrupt the thoroughly secular world of literature in contemporary Muslim societies. A more appealing angle might be to focus on writing Islam in the West, or on the global stage, where a growing body of Muslim literature written in European languages is emerging. The authors of this body of literature are outside two folds: Western literature per se and the literatures of their Muslim societies of origin. How do Muslim authors, specifically poets, fashion a voice when they are writing mostly to outsiders? What subject matter will they treat and in what manner? This essay explores these questions by examining how writing Islam is exercised differently by three American Muslim poets, Mohja Kahf, Daniel Moore, and the late Agha Shahid Ali.

So now the pictures will continue to “assault” us—as many Americans are bound to feel. Will people get used to them? Some Americans are already saying that they have seen “enough.”

When The ABU Ghraib Prison torture scandal began to circulate throughout The MASS media in Spring 2004, most pundits and commentators neglected to note how those images hauntingly paralleled the 9/11 attacks, insofar as each event's widespread publicity—replayed and reposted images of physical and psychological destruction—participated in the very unmaking that the perpetrators intended. In other words, just as the terrorist act on the Twin Towers was an act of both material and symbolic destruction that required media representation of the planes hitting the towers, mass media's recirculation of visual images of naked and dominated Iraqi men completed the act that Charles Graner and other United States military police had begun. Though the disturbing video representation of the 9/11 attacks rapidly disappeared from television, the Abu Ghraib photos persisted far longer (see York). The rapid disappearance of video of the planes striking the buildings suggests its traumatic power for Americans. But why would the Abu Ghraib photos be less disturbing than those of the attacks of September 11, 2001—given what they say about United States conduct in the war? In this essay, I consider the Abu Ghraib effect in the wider context of imperial imaging of the other. Second, I analyze artistic and literary responses (including Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib paintings, Daniel Heyman's etchings, and an anthology of poems on torture) that attempt to re-present Abu Ghraib and make visible the invisible of that torture. Third, I sketch out how Arab American poets have played (and can continue to play) a critical role in the conversation about the effects of United States policies in the Middle East. Finally, I share my own poetic project, a long poem called “–u –r—” that attempts to make audible the muted voices of the tortured Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.

In the early quatrains of “Rubaiyat,” a poem in Lawrence Joseph's fourth book, into it, The poet adopts a curious perspective for an American poet of Arab ancestry who is intensely critical of American military aggression. Taking on the “eye” of the aggressor, he pulls up the “satellite image of a major / military target, a 3-D journey / into a landscape of hills and valleys.” He follows the lens as it zooms closer to the ground: