... Dirlik for his invaluable advice on how to revise the essay. I would also like to thank Nicole Kwoh for her kind assistance. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. The Importance of Being Chinese: Orientalism Reconfigured in the Age of Global Modernity...

... and with what degree of importance. The ethics of the other seems dangerously close to existentialist versions of authenticity. The test case is Simon Critchley’s elegantly argued Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance . This book seems trapped into having to convert the negatives...

... to important developments in current politics. One of the most notable aspects of the literature is its unwillingness to approach neoliberalism primarily as a set of epistemological precepts, recruited in service of a political program. Marxists in particular seem to find this proposition an anathema...

...: that the reforms would inevitably lead to incorporation in a global capitalist economy. Especially important in the discussion was the appearance of new class divisions in Chinese society. The second part of this article reflects on this prognostication from a contemporary perspective. While Chinese society has...

... , the modern Chinese vernacular, offer important insights into the mission-encumbered language of China's present-day intellectual elite. As the critical exemplar of choice in intellectual China, Lu Xun's evocative formulations, together with his aspiration to transform hearts and minds through baihua , have...

...Eric O. Clarke Widespread critical efforts to understand modernity rely upon the term lifestyle . Studying this use shows both scholars' ambiguous moral relation to the modern and, as important, their uneasy relation to morals and morality and a deep uncertainty about their nature. Historically...

...Bradley J. Fest This interview with esteemed literary critic J. Hillis Miller was conducted via Skype on July 17, 2013. Miller speaks about a number of issues important to his life and work. Providing a number of emblematic parables, Miller discusses his early career, his work on the poetry...

... (via Walter Benjamin) as a necessary structural possibility inherent in the original texts, the essay argues that translation is a constitutive feature of all Marxisms and communisms (including Marx's and Lenin's) across time and space. The essay traces the importance of translation as both an actual...

... Zabala is not too quick to leave other debates about the state of exception (in the work of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben, for example) aside in his discussion of the state of exception. Such an approach is important from a strictly internal perspective, to assess Heidegger’s...

... the transnational impulses in recent Asian American literature. Using asymmetry as an analytical lens, it then provides a critical interpretation of Ruth Ozeki’s important novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013) to consider the intricate connections between Asia and North America that are embedded...

... thought. Her Thoreau is a prophet with a freshly thought‐out message about how perpetual mourning drives the perpetual renewal of life, about the importance of disindividualizing, and about the persistence of life at its most basic and elemental level. Arsić shows how, once we learn to see and hear...

..., “nothingness” in Bernstein's poetics is endowed with profound poetic and aesthetic implications. Bernstein studied the works of Zen-Taoist philosophy in his early years. Understanding the Zen-Taoist connotations of “nothingness” is an important new dimension in interpreting Bernstein's echopoetics. Bernstein...

...David Lloyd Abstract This review of Seamus Deane's posthumously published volume of essays, Small World: Ireland, 1798–2018 , is also a preliminary effort to assess the career and intellectual importance of a major Irish scholar, critic, and public intellectual. While the essays gathered in Small...

...Pheng Cheah This essay evaluates the rise of recognition as an important analytical category in critical theory for understanding the normative grounds of social and political struggles for global justice in the contemporary world. It begins with a discussion of different variants...

... that the frequent application of postcolonial theories to the study of the region is to some extent enlightening but essentially insufficient. The author then broaches the main topic of the article—the import of Eastern European art in recent processes of subjectivization, identification, and representation...

... important ideological references of the “neoconservative revolution” envisioned by these ideologues, such as decisionism, the radicalization of the majoritarian principle toward a plebiscitary understanding of democracy, the reliance on the voluntary activism of an uncivil society, and, finally...

... between academics and critics that Wolcott engaged in at the outset of his career was not necessary but was a way for him to pursue his own idea of how critics should do their job and what is most important about this job. We have suffered for some three decades or more the waning of criticism...

...Eli Friedlander The task of the present commentary on “Critique of Violence” is to bring to light a progression in Walter Benjamin's essay that has important implications for the assessment of the essay's content. One should not take violence as a generic term and view the essay as enumerating...

... of social order caused by the pitting of order against freedom. Such consequences suggest a strong need for China to develop the value of freedom. But it is possible and important to do so in a critical spirit, as I argue through a critical analysis of the place of freedom in a liberal society. © 2011...

... monolithic official discourse. While the party-state continues to closely supervise the public sphere, the introduction of markets, the relative diversification of media producers, and the increasing volume of media introduce a degree of dynamism and unpredictability. Seeing important change but recognizing...