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 "‘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