IN THE LONG process of gestation of this book—going back to its first conceptualization realized in an essay (“Travelling Multiculturalism: French Intellectuals and the U.S. Culture Wars”) published in Black Renaissance Noire in 2001—we have received the support of many friends, colleagues, and institutions. We would like to thank the following for offering insightful commentary on earlier drafts or sections or on oral presentations of the project: Christopher Dunn, Patrick Erouart, Ismail Xavier, Jim Cohen, Manthia Diawara, Ziad Elmarsafy, Sérgio Costa, James Stam, Anne Donadey, Marcelo Fiorini, Randal Johnson, George Yúdice, Diana Taylor, Neil Smith, Michael Hanchard, Yaël Bitton, Randy Martin, Robert Young, and Rajeswari Sunder. Various readers for NYU Press—notably Arturo Escobar, Minoo Moallem, and Dilip Gaonkar—made useful suggestions. We are also grateful for the indispensible assistance we have received at various stages from Benjamin Minh Ha, Cecilia Sayad, Paulina Suarez-Hesketh, Karen Wang, Sandra Ruiz, Leili Kashani, Karim Tartoussieh, and Leo Goldsmith, and especially from Jennifer Kelly, who has been wonderfully helpful during the diverse stages of the project, including up through the demanding work of indexing. We are also grateful to NYU Press editor in chief Eric Zinner for his support and patience and to managing editor Despina Papazoglou Gimbel and copyeditor Andrew Katz for their meticulous work.
The intellectual conversations promoted by various centers at NYU have been an endless source of stimulation and inspiration. Here we would like to cite La Maison Française, the Institute of French Studies, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, the Juan Carlos of Spain Center, the Center for Media, Culture and History, and the Center for Art and Public Policy in Tisch School of the Arts, along with various seminars and discussion groups such as the Postcolonial Studies Seminar and the Comparative Race Studies Group. Our warm appreciation also goes to the following: Evelyn Alsultany, Awam Amkpa, Vincent Carelli, Ernesto Ignacio de Carvalho, Moncef Cheikrouhou, Luiz Antonio Coelho, Marc Cohen, Amalia Cordova, Karel Depollo, Ayse Franko, Eti and Selim Franko, Faye Ginsburg, Inderpal Grewal, Maurice Hazan, Caren Kaplan, Kate Lyra, Ivone Margulies, Anne McClintock, Rob Nixon, Yigal Nizri, Marcelle Pithon, Mary Louise Pratt, Yvette Raby, Jolene Ricard, Ilda Santos, Eyal Sivan, Shouleh Vatanabadi, João Luiz Vieira, and Anne Wax.
We would like to thank the following colleagues and institutions for facilitating the presentation of our work (alone or together): Inderpal Grewal and the “Culture and Theory” Lecture Series at the University of California, Irvine; Caroline Cappucin and L’Institut d’Amérique Latine in Paris; Yasuko Takezawa and the Institute for Research in Humanities at Kyoto University, Japan; Patrick Wolfe and the University of Melbourne, Australia; Deane Williams and Monash University, Australia; Manuela Ribeiro Sanchez and the “Europe in Black & White” conference at the Centro de Estudos Comparatistas at the University of Lisbon, Portugal; Arnold H. Itwaru and the University of Toronto; Armida de la Garza and Nottingham University in Ningpo, China; Manuela Boatcă and the “Critical Thought/Transformative Practice Seminar” at the Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Diana Accaria and the “Seminar on Postcolonial Theory” and the Departments of English, History, and Comparative Literature at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras; Suvir Kaul and Ania Loomba and the “Postcolonial Studies and Beyond” conference, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Vermonja Alston and York University, Toronto; the Borcher’s Lecture Series, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Timothy Powell, Eve Troute Powell, and the “Multicultural Studies” conference at the University of Georgia; Frederic Viguier and Francine Goldenhar at the Maison Française at New York University; Diana Taylor and NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and its encuentros in Monterrey, Mexico, and Lima, Peru; Edward Said, Joseph Massad, and Gil Anidjar and the Comparative Cultures University Seminar, Columbia University; Dora Baras and the Subversive Film Festival in Zaghreb, Croatia; the “Area Studies in the Era of Globalization” seminar at the Social Science Research Council, New York; Lucia Nagib and the World Cinema program at Leeds University, England; Leslie Bethell and the Center for Brazilian Studies at Oxford University; Sérgio Costa and the Conference on Brazil at the Free University in Berlin; Armida de la Garza and the Conference on Co-Productions in Puebla, Mexico; Zé Gatti, SOCINE, and the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil; Omar Gonzales and ICAIC, Havana, Cuba; Brazilian Association of Comparative Literature (ABRALIC), Federal University of Salvador Bahia; the Alliance Française in New York City; Casa do Saber, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Faye Ginsburg and the Center for Media, Culture and History, NYU; and Tim Mitchell and ICAS, NYU.
We have also benefited from the opportunities to conduct seminars related to the issues of the book at the University of São Paulo, Brazil (Shohat, Spring 2010); the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Stam, Spring 2010); the Federal University of Cuiaba, Brazil (Stam, Spring 2010); the Institute of Postcolonial Transcultural Studies and at the University of Bremen, Germany, the Inaugural Lectures/Seminar Series hosted by Sabine Broeck (Shohat and Stam, June–July 2009); the NYU in Paris Program and Caroline Montel and Katherine Fleming at the NYU Center for European Studies, as well as Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III, hosted by Jacques Aumont and Philippe Dubois (Shohat and Stam, Fall 2008); the School of Criticism & Theory, and Dominick LaCapra, Cornell University, 30th Summer Session (Shohat and Stam 2006), and the Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory: Present Tense Empires, Race, Bio-Politics, and David Goldberg and Lisa Lowe, at the UC Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine (Shohat 2005).
Several awards and fellowships have advanced our work on this project: a Fulbright Lectureship/Research Award in Brazil (Shohat, Spring 2010); the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies Fellowship at Princeton University (Stam, 2009); the International Center of Advanced Studies Fellowship at New York University on the theme of “The Authority of Knowledge in a Global Age” (Shohat, 2006–2007); and the fellowship at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, CUNY Graduate Center (Shohat, 2000–2001). We also would like to thank Asya Berger and Jane Tylus and the Humanities Initiative at NYU for the Grants-in-Aid to support this project,(Shohat and Stam); to FAS Dean for the Humanities Lauren Benton for the supplemental fund in conjunction with the Fulbright award (2010, Shohat); and to dean of the Tisch School of the Arts Mary Schmidt Campbell for the TSOA Senior Faculty Development Grant (Shohat, 2003–2004).
Some earlier versions of sections of the book have been published in the following journals or books: Stam/Shohat, “Postcolonial Studies and France,” Interventions (forthcoming, Spring 2012); Stam/Shohat, “Transnationalizing Comparison: The Uses and Abuses of Cross-Cultural Analogy,” New Literary History 40, no. 3 (Summer 2009); Shohat/Stam, “What Is Eurocentrism?,” in Arnold H. Itwaru, ed., The White Supremacist State: Eurocentrism, Imperialism, Colonialism, Racism (Toronto: Other Eye, 2009); Shohat, “On the Margins of Middle Eastern Studies: Situating Said’s Orientalism,” in “On Orientalism at Thirty,” special section of Review of Middle Eastern Studies (published plenary session lecture, MESA 2008) 43, no. 1 (Summer 2009); Shohat/Stam, “Cultural Debates in Translation,” in Revathi Krishnaswamy and John Hawley, eds., The Postcolonial and the Global (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Shohat/Stam, “Imperialism and the Fantasies of Democracy,” Rethinking Marxism 19, no. 3 (July 2007); Shohat, “Post-Fanon and the Colonial: A Situational Diagnosis,” in Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Shohat, “Black, Jew, Arab: Postscript to The Wretched of the Earth” (first published in the Hebrew translation of Fanon’s book in 2006), in Christopher Wise and Paul James, eds., Being Arab: Arabism and the Politics of Recognition (Melbourne, Australia: Arena, 2010); Shohat/Stam, “Traveling Multiculturalism: A Debate in Translation,” in Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzel, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty, eds., Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Shohat/Stam, “De-Eurocentrizing Cultural Studies: Some Proposals,” in Ackbar Abbas and John Nguyet Erni, eds., Internationalizing Cultural Studies: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); Stam, “Fanon, Algeria, and the Cinema: The Politics of Identification,” in Shohat/Stam, eds., Multiculturalism, Post-coloniality and Transnational Media (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Shohat/Stam, “Travelling Multiculturalism: French Intellectuals and the U.S. Culture Wars,” Black Renaissance Noir (Fall 2001); Stam, “Multiculturalism and the Neo-Conservatives,” in Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat, eds., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Shohat/Stam, “From the Imperial Family to the Transnational Imaginary: Media Spectatorship in the Age of Globalization,” in Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
Finally, we would like to thank Matthew Cusick for generously allowing us to use his artwork “Fiona’s Wave, 2005” for the book cover of Race in Translation. What drew us to the image was its collage conjugation of displaced fragments of maps and its powerful evocation of oceanic movement. The suggestion of breaking surf, conjuring up tempests and shipwrecks, resonates in the context of the book with the Middle Passages of the Black (Afro-diasporic) Atlantic, as well as with the travails of the Red (indigenous) Atlantic. Learning that Fiona in Gaelic means “white” or “fair,” meanwhile, rhymes with our theme of the White Atlantic and critical Whiteness studies. Our book traces, in a sense, an epic encounter of perspectives—between the view-from-the-ship and the view-from-the-shore, or between the caravels and the canoes—generating the turbulent crossings of epistemologies. The cover image opens up to the various aquatic metaphors that run through the book and to the oceanic intellectual space charted here. The disorienting dispersal of the maps, meanwhile, reverberates with our emphasis on the diasporas, passages, dislocations, and interconnections that have shaped the multidirectional flow of ideas around the post/colonial Atlantic.
Robert Stam/Ella Shohat
New York University