Afterword: It Takes Two to Tangle

This brief afterword uses the image of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City to reflect on the north-south contact zones of the Americas, then goes on to examine how the five essays collected in this special issue of Social Text, which were presented at the 2008 Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas inhabit that space and inquire after its unequal, often violent dynamics. I comment on the new archives and objects of study that north-south research brings into view, and on the ways they exemplify the methodological challenges faced by cultural studies at this point in its emergence.