Foreword: Reclaiming Literature as Public Forum

To ask questions about what literature can do in the age of globalization is to run into a confrontation with the new trends in cultural studies in the American academy. The insightful essays in this issue of Concentric represent an attempt to think about the tensions and alliances between a humanistic discipline and a culturalist response to socioeconomic problems outside the well-wrought urn of the established canons and taste. If literature is not a distinct, bounded object of knowledge or a solitary playground for therapeutic or expressive release, it is part of social and historical movements in modern times. If literature is still active as a protagonist in the ongoing practice that seeks to speak truth to power, pit imagination against instrumental rationality, and transform the conditions of domination and oppression, why would one look for new grounds in cultural studies for a more effective political agency? In its more vibrant forms literature is associated with an unfinished history of the republic of letters, that is, with public opinion, dissent, national self-determination, ethnic memory, and the dream of a just world. Although it has often been domesticated into a handmaid of the ideological apparatus of the capitalist or socialist-turned capitalist state, as in doctrinaire liberal education and the nationalism of the self-inflated ego, literature, in its undying “imagination” of a better world and its critique of the unjust reality, is a reflective, hermeneutically challenging, and public-spirited enterprise.