When Jack London's human characters interact with dogs and wolves in texts such as the call of the wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), erotic fireworks often light up the wild. The love between the dog Buck and his human partner, John Thornton, in The Call of the Wild is characterized as “[l]ove, genuine passionate love. … love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration, that was madness” (59–60). In White Fang, the half wolf of the title experiences a love for Weedon Scott that “manifested itself to [White Fang] as a void in his being—a hungry, aching, yearning void that clamored to be filled. It was a pain and an unrest; and it received easement only by the touch of the new god's presence” (244). Instead of reading these passionate nonhuman characters as “real” animals, literary and cultural critics often read them as “men in furs,” in Mark Seltzer's memorable phrase, leading to interesting and important discussions of, for example, homoerotic interactions between men.

Among the most historically fixed of art historical and literary concepts, the Baroque arises at the intersection of early modern classicism, imperialism, and science—that is, out of the high Renaissance—to become a kind of antiprogram of resistances: to the absolutist state, the rise of empirical science, the pressures of empire, and other sixteenth-century signs of the gathering regimentation of knowledge. With a flourish of forms and a play of perspectives, the baroque embodies the recoil from such regimentation and the gathering sense that all these systems for organizing human experience fall short in the face of disorder, contingency, and death. Seen from certain vantages, the specimens of the baroque often seem complicit with the projects of absolutism, empire, and late humanism; but regarded in all their dimensions, such works are often complex reactions, critical and compromised, to those projects.

Jarhead, Anthony Swofford's 2003 memoir of the Persian Gulf War, and My War: Killing Time in Iraq, Colby Buzzell's 2005 memoir of the Iraq War, emphasize the authors' voyeuristic delight in watching war movies before and during their military service. What follows their enthusiastic consumption of “military pornography,” however, is a crisis of nonidentification and a lingering uncertainty about the significance of war in their own lives. Swofford and Buzzell find that the gaze they initially wielded is turned on them, and in response Swofford roils with sexually coded anger and frustration while Buzzell chooses to amplify his exposure by starting a blog. The two memoirs, then, provide a compelling account of the relation between changing technologies of representation and the experience of postmodern war. These lines of sight, all targeting the spectacle of combat, reveal the contemporary intersections among war, media, and agency.

The censored media coverage of the Persian Gulf War obscured the region's geography and erased the suffering of combatants and civilians. In contrast, the literature and film on the war emphasize the human rather than the technological dimension of the fighting. The words and images used to represent the foot soldiers' deeply personal experiences are bound to the landscape. This essay sets forth a geographic semiotics of Persian Gulf War combat narratives, which entails the study of an array of geographically oriented codes for making meaning out of wartime experience. The study of geographic signs in these narratives revolves around images and descriptions of the desert, which permeate such literary and filmic accounts of the ground fighting as Anthony Swofford's memoir Jarhead (2003), Sam Mendes's film adaptation Jarhead (2005), and David Russell's Three Kings (1999). Practicing a geographic semiotics of Persian Gulf War combat narratives allows us to rethink the war, to reimagine what its stories might signify—morally as well as politically.

During my winter sabbatical of 2004, I found myself one day in Hayneville, Alabama, a small hamlet off highway 80, the lonely stretch of asphalt that connects Selma with Montgomery. This is the same road that hundreds walked in 1965, to be joined by thousands more as they neared the state's capitol building in the last hurrah of the modern civil rights movement.

Pixar's animated feature wall-E (2008) revolves around a sentient robot, a small trash compactor who faith fully continues his programmed duties seven hundred years into the future, after humans have long abandoned their polluted home planet. Landscaped into skyscrapers of compacted waste, Earth no longer seems to harbor any organic life other than a cockroach, Wall-E's only and constant friend. Similarly, in Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004; ), sequel to the groundbreaking first Ghost in the Shell anime, the love of the cyborg police officer Batou for his vanished colleague Motoko Kusanagi is surpassed only by the care and affection he displays for his pet basset hound. These films are two recent examples of works of science fiction in which the emergence of new kinds of humanoid consciousness in robots, cyborgs, or biotechnologically produced humans is accompanied by a renewed attention to animals. Why? In what ways does the presence of wild, domestic, genetically modified, or mechanical animals reshape the concerns about the human subject that are most centrally articulated, in many of these works, through technologically produced and reproduced human minds and bodies?

Cuba assumes a special place in the genealogy of the latin American Baroque and its twentieth-century recuperation, ongoing in our twenty-first century—the neobaroque. As Alejo Carpentier has pointed out (and as architectural critics confirm), the Caribbean lacks a monumental architectural baroque heritage comparable with that of the mainland, such as the hyperornate Churrigueresque ultrabaroque of central Mexico and Peru (fig. 1). Nevertheless, it was two Cuban intellectuals, Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima, who spearheaded a new turn in neobaroque discourse after World War II by popularizing the notion of an insurgent, mestizo New World baroque unique to the Americas. Carpentier and Lezama Lima are the key authors of the notion of a decolonizing American baroque, a baroque that expressed contraconquista (counterconquest), as Lezama punned, countering the familiar identification of the baroque with the repressive ideology of the Counter-Reformation and its allies, the imperial Catholic Iberian states (80). Lezama and Carpentier argue that the imported Iberian state baroque was transformed into the transculturated, syncretic New World baroque at the hands of the (often anonymous) native artisans who continued to work under the Europeans, grafting their own indigenous traditions onto the iconography of the Catholic baroque style. The New World baroque is a product of the confluence (however unequal) of Iberian, pre-Columbian, and African cultures during the peaceful seventeenth century and into the eighteenth in Spain's and Portugal's territories in the New World. The examples studied by Lezama and Carpentier are all from the monumental baroque sculpture and architecture of Mexico, the Andes, and Brazil's Minas Gerais province: the work of the Brazilian mulatto artist O Aleijadinho (Antônio Francisco Lisboa [1738–1814]; see fig. 2 in Zamora in this issue) and the indigenous Andean artist José Kondori (dates unknown; see fig. 1 in Zamora), central Mexico's Church of San Francisco Xavier Tepotzotlán (fig. 1), and the folk baroque Church of Santa María Tonantzintla (see fig. 3 in Zamora), to mention a few landmarks and names.

In the United States, the best-known antiwar speech of the past decade is not antiwar. Barack Obama's remarks, delivered at an antiwar rally in Chicago in October 2002, are about timing and the place of “reason” in war. At no time is war's place questioned: because it is necessary, it is, sometimes, inevitable. Combined with the entrenchment of war attributed to Heraclitus, this sets the stage for reflection on war here and now: it is about timing, about centering, about naming, about reasoning—about the politics of the cities we build and inhabit. The pervasiveness of the assumption that war is necessary calls attention to the question that guides this essay: whether and how we might cultivate judgment that is intuitively opposed to war rather than intuitively resigned to it. (SS)

The title of understudies, Mary Wilkins Freeman's 1901 short story collection, situates us in the realm of theater, of performance—the space where actors and their seconds together learn the grammars of verbal and visual representation.1 On the cover of Understudies, cameo portraits linked by garlands mimic the arrangement of actors' head shots on a playbill (fig. 1). But the profiles are those of a horse, a dog, a parrot, a monkey, a squirrel, and a cat. Freeman's book displays on its face the art of representing animals and humans—and animals as humans. And her title articulates a distinctly turn-of-the-century (if still unresolved) question: who are the understudies and who are the leads—animals or humans?

During the Baroque period, Luis De GÓngora y Argote (1561–1627) wrote the first Spanish-language closeted literature. Some three hundred years later, the challenging originality of his closet verse, openly studied and appreciated by a cultured, intellectual elite, played a pivotal role in the development of homosexual literature in the early-twentieth-century avant-garde movements of Spain and Latin America. This essay will briefly explore how twentieth-century Mexican avant-garde writers expressed the closet using baroque models. The thesis is that the rhetorical strategies of obscuritas provided Góngora an ideal instrument for representing the closet, which in literature is defined as a symbolic space that allows writers to represent and readers to recognize homosexuality in a heterosexual context. The pertinent OED definition of closet as an adjective reads, “secret, covert, used esp. with reference to homosexuality” (“Closet”). This recognized use of obscuritas is validated further in the observations of the Peruvian colonial writer Espinosa Medrano, one of Góngora's seventeenth-century commentators, who epitomizes the consolidation of baroque aesthetics in Hispanic America by the criollo elite. The final chapter in this tour of the baroque closet will examine how the Mexican avant-garde became aware of obscuritas through Federico García Lorca's Gongorine lectures and poetry.

In his presidential address at the 1970 MLA convention, Maynard Mack sounded a warning bell concerning activism and the future of literary studies. Faced with a seemingly endless conflict in Vietnam and a national student body growing polarized in its response to this war, higher education, including language-based pedagogy, was in crisis. Of particular concern to Mack was a growing generational disconnect over the role of activism in the literature classroom. He cited a landmark study in which nearly two-thirds of all professors over the age of thirty maintained that any foray into politics should be avoided, if not altogether prohibited, in formal course work. The younger generation disagreed: two-thirds of them, in fact, felt a moral and pedagogical obligation to use colleges and universities as loci for social change. This ideological divide, Mack predicted, would soon create “a crisis of authority in the offing beside which all current manifestations would look pale” (365).

One winter morning, the student scanning cards at the front desk of the university gym noticed the “faculty” label on mine and asked which department I was in. I replied that I teach in English. A middle-aged man who checked in behind me chased me down the hall. When he caught me, he exclaimed with frustration, “English, eh? Well, could you please get students to stop using plural pronouns when they need singular ones? Everyone—they, someone—they. It's just terrible English.”

In the wake of the collapse of the cold war bipolar world order, Jacques Derrida wrote:

Losing the enemy would simply be the loss of the political itself. … The invention of the enemy is where the urgency and the anguish are: this invention is what would have to be brought off, in sum to repoliticize, to put an end to depoliticization. Where the principal enemy, the “structuring” enemy, seems nowhere to be found, where it ceases it to be identifiable and thus reliable—that is, where the same phobia projects a mobile multiplicity of potential interchangeable metonymic enemies, in secret alliance with one another: conjuration. (Politics 84)