Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
         Editors' Introduction: Multiplying Identities
         A literary historian might very well characterize the eighties as
            the period when race, class, and gender became the holy trinity of
            literary criticism. 's contribution to this
            shift in critical paradigms took the form of two special issues,
            "Writing and Sexual Difference," and
            "&lsquo;Race,' Writing and Difference." In the
            1990s, however, "race," "class," and
            "gender" threaten to become the regnant clichés of our
            critical discourse. Our object in this special issue is to help
            disrupt the cliché-ridden discourse of identity by exploring the
            formation of identities and the problem of subjectivity.
            Scholars in a variety of disciplines have begun to address what we
            might call the politics of identity. Their work expands on the
            evolving, anti-essentialist critiques of ethnic, sexual, national,
            and racial identities, particularly the work of those post-
            structuralist theorists who have articulated concepts of
            difference. The calls for a "post-essentialist"
            reconception of notions of identity have become increasingly
            common. The powerful resurgence of nationalisms in Eastern Europe
            provides just one example of the catalysts for such theorizing.
             
            Kwame Anthony Appiah,author of Assertion and Conditionals(1985),
            Truth in Semantics(1986), and Necessary Questions (1989), has also
            published a novel, Avenging Angel (1990), and a collection of
            essays, In My Father's House (1992). His most recent
            contribution to  was "Is the Post- in
            Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?" (Winter 1991).
            Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,is coeditor of Transition,a quarterly
            review, and the author of Figures in Black (1987), The Signifying
            Monkey (1988), and Loose Canons (1992). His latest contribution to
             was "Critical Fanonism" (Spring 1991).
Gananath Obeyesekere
         "British Cannibals": Contemplation of an Event in the_Death_and
            Resurrection of James Cook, Explorer
         I have recently completed a work entitled The Apotheosis of Captain
            Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific.1 In it I present an
            alternative view of the events leading to the apotheosis of James
            Cook by the Hawaiians in 1779 when he first landed there, in effect
            making the case that the supposed deification of the white
            civilizer is a Western myth model foisted on the Hawaiians and
            having a long run in European culture and consciousness. As a
            result of reading the extensive logs and journals of Cook's
            voyages, I have become interested in the manner in which
            "cannibalism" got defined in these voyages. My reading
            of these texts suggests that statements about cannibalism reveal
            more about the relations between Europeans and Savages during early
            and late contact than, as ethnographic statements, about the nature
            of Savage anthropophagy.
             
            1. See Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook:
            European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, N.J., forthcoming).
             
            Gananath Obeyesekere teaches anthropology at Princeton University.
            He is the author of The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European
            Mythmaking in the Pacific (forthcoming).
Walter Benn Michaels
         Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural_Identity
         Our sense of culture is characteristically meant to displace race,
            but part of the argument of this essay has been that culture has
            turned out to be a way of continuing rather than repudiating racial
            thought. It is only the appeal to race that makes culture an object
            of affect and that gives notions like losing our culture,
            preserving it, stealing someone else's culture, restoring
            people's culture to them, and so on, their pathos. Our race
            identifies the culture to which we have a right, a right that may
            be violated or defended, repudiated or recovered. Race transforms
            people who learn to do what we do into the thieves of our culture
            and people who teach us to do what they do into the destroyers of
            our culture; it makes assimilation into a kind of betrayal and the
            refusal to assimilate into a form of heroism. Without race, losing
            our culture can mean no more than doing things differently from the
            way we now do them and preserving our culture can mean no more than
            doing things the same the melodrama of assimilation
            disappears.41 If, of course, doing things differently turns out to
            mean doing them worse, then the change will seem regrettable. But
            it's not the loss of our culture that will make it
            regrettable; it's the fact that the culture that will then be
            ours will be worse than the culture that used to be ours. It is, of
            course, always possible and often likely that things will get
            worse; abandoning our idea of culture, however, will not make them
            worse.
             
            Walter Benn Michaelsis professor of English and the humanities at
            The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Gold Standard
            and the Logic of Naturalism (1987) and of a monograph on American
            literature in the Progressive period, forthcoming in the Cambridge
            History of American Literature. His previous contributions to
             include "Against Theory" and
            "Against Theory 2," both written in collaboration with
            Steven Knapp.
Xiaomei Chen
         Occidentalism as Counterdiscourse: "He Shang" in Post-Mao China
         In the years since its introduction, Edward Said's celebrated
            study Orientalism has acquired a near-paradigmatic status as a
            model of the relationships between Western and non-Western
            cultures. Said seeks to show how Western imperialist images of its
            colonial others images that, of course, are inevitably and
            sharply at odds with the self-understanding of the indigenous non-
            Western cultures they purport to represent not only govern
            the West's hegemonic policies, but were imported into the
            West's political and cultural colonies where they affected
            native points of view and thus served as instruments of domination
            themselves. Said's focus is on the Near East, but his critics
            and supporters alike have extended his model far beyond the
            confines of that part of the world. Despite the popularity of
            Said's model, however, comparatists and sinologists have yet
            to make extensive use of it in their attempts to define
            China's self-image or the nature of the Sino-Western social,
            cultural, and political relationships.
             
            Xiaomei Chen is assistant professor of Chinese and comparative
            literature at Ohio State University. She has recently completed a
            book on the politics of cross-cultural
            "misunderstanding" in modern China and the West, and is
            now working on a cultural study of post-Mao Chinese theater.
Diana Fuss
         Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look
Hazel V. Carby
         Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban_Context
Sara Suleri
         Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
         Acting Bits/Identity Talk
Saree S. Makdisi
         The Empire Renarrated: "Season of Migration to the_North"_and_the
            Reinvention of the Present
Akeel Bilgrami
         What Is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural_Identity
Katie Trumpener
         The Time of the Gypsies: A "People without_History"_in_the
            Narratives of the West
