CONTENTS 

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                         Articles

Chris Bongie, Exiles on Main Stream: Valuing the 
Popularity of Postcolonial Literature

Christy L. Burns, Postmodern Historiography: Politics 
and the Parallactic Method in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

Steven Helmling, Constellation and Critique: 
Adorno's Constellation, Benjamin's Dialectical Image
 
Peter Yoonsuk Paik, Smart Bombs, Serial Killing, and 
the Rapture: The Vanishing Bodies of Imperial Apocalypticism 


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                        An Exchange

Leonard Wilcox, Baudrillard, September 11, and the 
Haunting Abyss of Reversal

Brad Butterfield, Reply to Leonard 
Wilcox

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                       Review Essay

Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Gullivers, Lilliputians,
and the Root of Two Cultures. A review of Arkady Plotnitsky, The
Knowable and the Unknowable: Modern Science, Nonclassical 
Thought, and the "Two Cultures." 


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                          Reviews

Del Doughty, Materiality is the Message. A
review of N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines. Mediawork 
Pamphlet. Cambridge: MIT P, 2002. 

Diane Davis, Responsible Stupidity. A review of 
Avital Ronell, Stupidity. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. 

Valerie Karno, The Speedy Citizen. A review of
Elaine Scarry, Who Defended the Country? Elaine Scarry in a 
New Democracy Forum on Citizenship, National Security, and 
9/11. Eds. Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers. Boston: Beacon, 2003. 

Theresa Smalec, Theatres of Memory: The Politics
and Poetics of Improvised Social Dancing in Queer Clubs. 
A review of Fiona Buckland, Impossible Dance: Club Culture 
and Queer World-Making. Middletown:  Wesleyan UP, 2002. 


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                  Notices (WWW Version Only)


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                  Notes on Contributors


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                         Abstracts

Chris Bongie, Exiles on Main Stream: Valuing the
Popularity of Postcolonial Literature

    o Abstract: This essay explores the problematic (lack 
      of a) relation between postcolonial and cultural 
      studies. It argues that the commitment to mass 
      popular culture characteristic of so much work in 
      cultural studies is one that is largely absent from 
      postcolonial literary studies. If Jamaica Kincaid has 
      nothing but contempt for the media star Roseanne (as 
      related in the introductory pages of the essay), this 
      hostility is not simply a sport of her querulous 
      nature: counterintuitive as it might sound, her 
      dismissive attitude exemplifies the "foundational bias" 
      of postcolonial studies. The essay attempts to tease 
      out this modernist bias against the "inauthentically 
      popular" through several case studies, the first of 
      which involves Tony Delsham, the most popular writer 
      in the French Caribbean and yet one who is completely 
      ignored by academic critics. The reason why this is so 
      has much to do with the surreptitious elitism of 
      postcolonial literary studies. In the second section, 
      the essay introduces the concept of the "postcolonial 
      middlebrow," arguing that the consecration of a 
      novelist like Maryse Conde has gone hand-in-glove with 
      a dogged refusal on the part of her academic readers to 
      engage in any discussion of the middlebrow qualities of 
      her work--qualities that help account for her popular 
      appeal. The essay concludes by asserting a paradoxical 
      double imperative for the postcolonial (literary) critic 
      that entails both a concerted turn to cultural studies 
      and a self-conscious return to literary studies, a 
      thorough assimilation of the former's positive 
      assumptions about the value of the popular and a 
      cautious reassertion of the latter's necessarily doubtful, 
      and doubtfully necessary, claims about the value of the 
      aesthetic.--cb

Christy L. Burns, Postmodern Historiography: 
Politics and the Parallactic Method in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon


    o Abstract: In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon develops an important 
      new method for postmodern political insight, introducing 
      a parallactic method that allows him a dialectical 
      representation of "America" as it was in the mid-to-late 
      eighteenth century and as it is now, by various 
      implications. In his use of parallax, Pynchon interweaves 
      a critical representation of imperialism's oppressive 
      practices with a history of science and exploration. While 
      other writers have invoked parallax as a perspectival 
      method in order to challenge univocal narrative form,
      Pynchon works the concept more radically into his fictional 
      treatment of historiography. Avoiding any semblance of an 
      apolitical sketch of the past--or simple didactic 
      critique--he uses the same method that Mason and Dixon 
      employed to chart the transits of Venus and to draw their 
      boundary line, applying parallax to a series of 
      triangulated views, starting with Mason's and Dixon's 
      attempts to assess the New World and eventually delivering 
      a temporal form of parallax, a synchronization of the past 
      with the present. Pynchon's latest novel becomes his
      most political one, addressing social concerns such as 
      racism, sexism, market culture, and agency. The novel 
      critiques America's past (and by implication its present) 
      while also recasting history, reinterpreting it in a way 
      that might influence future trajectories. Pynchon
      continues his long-established interrogation of pragmatic 
      America's optimism about agency, while invoking a larger 
      cultural imaginary in search of a new national/cultural 
      image. --clb

Christopher Douglas, "You Have Unleashed a Horde of 
Barbarians!": Fighting Indians, Playing Games, Forming 
Disciplines


    o Abstract: We are about four or five years into the 
      formation of a new discipline, that of digital game 
      studies. At this  early stage, digital game studies 
      is necessarily and self-consciously concerned with its 
      own formation, and recent commentators have differed 
      over whether digital games should become part of an 
      already existing discipline like cinema, literary, 
      new media, or cultural studies or whether it needs to 
      resist such "colonizing" attempts and develop into a 
      discipline of its own, with a coherent object of study 
      and institutional support. This essay agrees with the 
      warnings against the kind of methodological blindnesses 
      likely to result from such colonizations--that games 
      will be understood as just a more interactive kind of 
      film or  narrative--but argues nonetheless that each of 
      these disciplines (and others) is likely to have 
      valuable conceptual tools that we need to carefully 
      adapt for game studies. Moreover, it's sometimes 
      precisely the historical baggage of the old disciplines 
      that provides insight into the structure of game use. 
      This essay argues that the ideological content of one 
      series of influential games, _Sid Meier's Civilization_ 
      series, comes to light when the historical, disciplinary 
      blindness to forms of American imperialism in American 
      literary studies are considered. The _Civilization_ 
      games transform and display the symbolic Native 
      presence in the land whose accidental, terrestrial 
      effects in the games must be destroyed in order for the 
      player to win the game; however, and moving beyond the 
      kind of ideological representations found in film or 
      narrative, in these games the users must perform their 
      logic, a logic which is coded into the very rules of 
      the game. Games like _Civilization_ thus rehearse a 
      series of lessons about national destiny, race and 
      colonization, and the moral fitness of civilizations 
      and individuals. --cd 


Janet Holtman, Documentary Prison Films and the 
Production of Disciplinary Institutional "Truth" 


    o Abstract: Drawing primarily upon Michel Foucault's 
      theories regarding knowledge and power, this essay 
      examines the discursive mode of the documentary prison 
      film. Beginning with Foucault's brief discussion of the 
      role of newspapers and crime novels in nineteenth-
      century France, the essay contemplates the similar ways 
      in which humanist discourses might be imbricated within 
      today's popular and documentary films and the particular 
      ways in which social force is disseminated by documentary 
      prison films. Steven Shaviro's conceptualization of the 
      "double articulation" of the bodily and the textual 
      within filmic discourse is a pivotal concept. The essay 
      concludes with an examination of Frederick Wiseman's 
      provocative prison documentary _Titicut Follies_, the 
      only American film ever to be banned for reasons other 
      than national security or obscenity (though the judge's 
      original decision contained an argument relating to the 
      latter, which the essay attempts to take into account). 
      Foucault's discussion of the asignificatory "monument" 
      in _The Archaeology of Knowledge plays an important role 
      in the essay's conclusions about Wiseman's film and 
      other documentaries. --jh