Abstract: THE HEGEMONIC "BLACK/WHITE" PARADIGM of race relations has fundamentally shaped how we think about, engage, and politically mobilize around racial issues. Historical narratives of racialized minorities in the United States are cast in the shadows of the black/white encounter. Contemporary conflicts between a number of different racial/ethnic groups are understood in relationship to this bipolar model, which the media then utilizes as a master frame to present such conflicts. During the Los Angeles "riots" of 1992, for example, various racial subjects were identified (for example, Koreans, Guatemalans), but the popular interpretation of the civil disorder was fundamentally shaped by the hegemonic paradigm. This prevailing bipolar model of race significantly obscures the complex patterns of race over time. Toma's Almaguer, in his study of race in nineteenthcentury California, breaks from the dominant mode of biracial theorizing by illustrating how Native Americans, Mexicans, Chinese, and Japanese are racialized and positioned in relation to one another by the dominant Anglo elite.' His discussion draws attention to how the Asian American historical experience is essential to a full comprehension of racial dynamics in the West. We want to suggest that a more complex and nuanced understanding of the affirmative action debate needs to be attentive to how distinct political positions socially construct and represent Asian Americans. Our intent is to locate Asian Americans within the political discourse on affirmative action, a move that would serve to deepen a critical analysis of the black/white paradigm, and, in doing so, reveal some intriguing aspects about racial politics in the current period. Gary Y. Okihiro, in a collection of essays on Asian American history and culture, asks: "Is yellow black or white?"2 His discussion of this question highlights how Asian Americans have historically been located somewhere between black and white. Depending on the period in question, Asian Americans have been seen as racially "black"3 or as a group "outwhiting the whites."4 The question of how to situate Asian Americans on a spectrum-close to African Americans at one end or closer to whites on the other-helps to critically define the distinctive political positions on affirmative action. Both the Right and

Abstract: IN THIS ESSAY I WOULD LIKE TO CONSIDER the origins of Chinese writing, the stylistic choices that influenced the creation of the early script, and the way those choices may help explain why Chinese writing remained, in its mature stage, logographic in nature, never developing a syllabary or alphabet as other written systems around the world have generally done.' The development of writing, intimately associated with the great shift from Neolithic culture to Bronze-Age civilization, is of particular interest in China, where it occurred roughly in the second millennium B.C., because it lies at the genesis of one of the world's great civilizations and because it largely occurred in isolation. That isolation, of course, encouraged the endurance of a logographic rather than alphabetic script inasmuch as Chinese literary culture, for the first two millennia or so of its existence, did not confront the variety of languages and scripts existing, say, in the contemporary Near East or Mediterranean worlds. The Chinese case is also significant because few cultures have so intimately combined high literacy, high civilization, and aesthetic prowess. Literacy in China involved not only a profound knowledge of the written classics but also the ability to wield a brush, either to paint a landscape, usually with a poem inscribed at its side, or to write Chinese characters so as to convey not just their meaning but also their aesthetic vitality and the taste of their composer. Chinese writing is important, finally, because of the seminal and overriding importance of Chinese script in the general history of East Asia. China was to the developing cultures of this area what the Near East, Greece, and Rome were to Europe. The oracle-bone inscriptions of the Late Shang dynasty (c. 1200-1050 B.C.), the earliest body of writing we yet possess for East Asia, were written in a script ancestral to all subsequent forms of Chinese writing. An oracle bone was either a cattle scapula or a turtle plastron used in a form of divination known to modern scholars as plastromancy or scapulimancy, depending on the material used. The diviner applied heat to the bone so as to produce stress cracks; the cracks were then "read" to foretell the future. This form of pyromancy has been found throughout much of Asia and as far east as Labrador in North America, but only the Bronze-Age Chinese carved the subject matter of their divinations into the bone itself (fig. 1) and associated this form of divination with written records. A few oracle-bone records have been found in which the writing was actually done by a brush in red or black ink.2 The aesthetic influence of the brush appears

Abstract: The man stricken with plague straightaway feels his strength drained, his pulse disordered, his heart jumping, his stomach churning; he experiences continual vomiting and retching, a strange lack of appetite, an extreme fever; the insides, even the head seem to be burning with pain; while the external parts are all frozen, the lower belly is all swollen, the stomach tight. He is seized with anxiety and cannot sleep and yet Zs endlessly drowsy. His face changes completely, the eyes become red and wild, his temples are drawn, his nostrils enlarge, his nose becomes pinched, the mouth, which exudes a cadaverous odor, hangs half open, his tongue goes dry and black, his lips turn leaden. He is afflicted by bouts of great thirst, he finds breathing difficult, his skin becomes spotted with red, violet and black pustules and marks and he is tortured by abcesses in several spots as his body becomes covered with buboes or painful tumors and other horrible symptoms.'

Abstract: MANY COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES PRACTICE some form of affirmative action based on race or ethnicity in their admissions process. They often justify affirmative action on the grounds that it promotes educational "diversity," somewhat loosely defined as a multiplicity of ideas, experiences, and viewpoints in the classroom and on the campus as a whole. A diverse student body and faculty is often said to be desirable for two main reasons. Schools hope that having a student body and faculty that hold many different viewpoints and approach issues from different perspectives will promote learning and lead to the production of greater knowledge for all. Seeing their mission as one of socializing their students and helping them to grow into good citizens, many schools also believe that if people from different backgrounds, who hold different values, can learn to communicate and respect differing points of view, both in and out of the classroom, they will be better prepared to deal with the challenges of living in a pluralistic and multicultural democracy. A racially and ethnically diverse student body is generally thought to be necessary for the accomplishment of these goals. No one can deny the power and importance of racial and ethnic categories. These categories are not arbitrary; instead, they reflect powerful social and historical forces. Like it or not, the racial and, to a lesser extent, ethnic categories with which a person identifies, or which others ascribe to a person, make an enormous difference in the way a person lives her life. People from different races and ethnicities are therefore reasonably presumed to have different experiences and thus to have developed different perspectives and viewpoints.' Affirmative action is one way to ensure that people from different cultural backgrounds, especially people whom the school identifies as belonging to certain racial or ethnic groups, are represented on campus.2 My purpose in this article is not to question the importance of these categories. Rather, my purpose is to probe their salience to the educational mission of diversity. Although race and ethnicity are concepts with considerable power, one can argue that they fail to capture adequately the actual social diversity of various groups. Such categories thus may fail to promote the goal of diversity of many schools' affirmative action programs. Although there are otherjustifications for affirmative action, such as the need to make reparation for past discrimination or the desire to prevent historically disadvantaged groups from remaining disadvantaged, schools most often publicly embrace the goal of creating a diverse student body and faculty because

Abstract: IN A LETTER ADDRESSED IN 1922 to his friend Roman Jakobson, the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky cheerfully wrote: "We know how life is made and how Don Quixote and the car are made too."' Literary criticism as a scientific enterprise, art as a technological artifact: this is the early Formalist program in a nutshell. The names of both correspondents, then in their twenties, would come to be definitively associated with this movement.2 At the time, Shklovsky was working on his book Theory of Prose, published in 1925, which included the chapters "How Don Quixote Is Made" and "Art as Device." The latter, first published in 1917, opened with some remarks on human psychology:

Abstract: I T S E E M S A S I F G E O R G E Spencer Brown's "first Law of Construction" does not apply solely to the logical and mathematical construction for which it is meant. It also applies strangely well to the space of cultural constructions and distinctions and to the spaces that are severed or cloven by such distinctions. The distinction with which this essay is concerned is the one between true and false in religion: a distinction that underlies the more specific ones between Jews and Gentiles, Christians and pagans, Muslims and unbelievers. Once this distinction is drawn, there is no end of reentries or subdistinctions. We start with Christians and pagans and end up with Catholics and Protestants, Calvinists and Lutherans, Socinians and Latitudinarians, and a thousand similar denominations and subdenominations. These cultural or intellectual distinctions construct a universe that is full not only of meaning, identity, and orientation but also of conflict, intolerance, and violence. Therefore, there have always been attempts to overcome the conflict by reexamining the true-false distinction, albeit at the risk of losing cultural meaning. Let us call the distinction between true and false in religion the "Mosaic distinction" because tradition ascribes it to Moses. While we cannot be sure that Moses ever lived, since there are no other traces of his earthly existence outside the legendary tradition, we can be sure, on the other hand, that he was not the first to draw the distinction. There was a precursor in the person of the Egyptian king Amenophis IV, who called himself Akhenaten and instituted a monotheistic religion in the fourteenth century B.C.2 His religion, however, created no lasting tradition and was forgotten immediately after his death. Moses is a figure of memory, but not of history, whereas Akhenaten is a figure of history, but not of memory. Since memory is all that counts in the sphere of cultural distinctions and constructions, we are justified in speaking not of "Akhenaten's distinction" but of the Mosaic distinction. The space severed or cloven by this distinction is the space of Western monotheism. It is the mental and cultural space constructed by this distinction that Europeans have inhabited for nearly two millennia.

Abstract: Prologue EVEN THE FIERCEST ANTAGONISTS are unaware of how the ghost of Richard Nixon hovers above the nation as we go through our current struggle over the fate of affirmative action. Nixon did more than any other president to promote and institutionalize affirmative action. While John Kennedy issued the initially limited executive orders in 1963, and while Lyndon Johnson had maneuvered through Congress the 1964 civil rights legislation that mandated selected forms in the workplace, it was Nixon who demanded and required that corporate America institute programs of affirmative action from inside the corporate walls. Why? Was Nixon really such a partisan of the use of law to help those excluded by both law and custom from full participation in the society? Hardly. Nixon's support for affirmative action was based upon the shrewd, if cynical, calculation that this beautiful wedge issue would fracture the Democratic party's old coalition of labor, Jews, and blacks. In their account of the Nixon strategy, his senior aide for domestic affairs, John Ehrlichman, his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, and most recently historian Kenneth O'Reilly each reveal a piece of the story of Nixon's scheme to use race policies and affirmative action to plant and nurture the seeds of dissent.' By insinuating affirmative action into the fabric of the workforce, Nixon was certain that it would someday come home to benefit the Republican party. While he saw clearly that group interests were central to the fate of affirmative action, not even Nixon could foresee that those group interests would reincarnate themselves in the disguise of claims to individual fairness. Surely Nixon is wearing, even now, that familiar taut smile, for the Republican party has seized upon what it regards as a propitious moment to pick the Nixon-ripened plum called California. To understand this return of the Ghost of Sixties Past, we need to describe first the ideological terrain on which it is staged.

Abstract: CALIFORNIA IS A FRANKENSTEINIAN laboratory of modern hopes and failures. It has provided fertile ground for fast-track capitalist development and experiments in liberal democracy, while at the same time allowing for the mingling of many diverse peoples. But the state has also displayed the antinomies of economic crisis, class hatred, racism, and political reaction. California has repeatedly set the agenda for the United States as a whole, for better or worse, and has set the tone again in the 1990s for a paroxysm of immigrant bashing and black-white racial antagonism. Today's Californians face the profound task of integrating a plethora of non-European peoples into what is still overwhelmingly a white man's republic, and their success or failure will mark this nation's history well into the next century. Alas, the prospects are dimmed by inauspicious circumstances of economic restructuring, class division, political recidivism, and recrudescent racism and classism. If Californians fail at this task, the desperately needed renewal of class and race relations, politics and government, work and economy will be put off yet again, and the United States will remain a staggering, increasingly monstrous presence on the world's stage.

Abstract: Ifind myselffor a moment in the interesting position of not knowing whether what I have to say should be regarded as something long familiar and obvious or as something entirely new and puzzling. But I am inclined to think the latter. I have at last been struck by the fact that the ego of a person whom we know as a patient in analysis must, dozens of years earlier, when it was young, have behaved in a remarkable manner in certain particular situations of pressure. We can assign in general and somewhat vague terms the conditions under which this comes about, by saying that it occurs under the inf lence of a psychical trauma. -Freud, "Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence" (1940)3

Abstract: BEGIN WITH THE FACTS. The founding Hollywood movie, The Birth of a Nation, celebrates the Ku Klux Klan. The first talking picture, The Jazz Singer, was a blackface film. The all-time top film box office success is Gone with the Wind. Blackface minstrelsy was the first and, before movies, the most popular form of mass culture in the United States. Burnt cork and the frontier myth together produced a self-conscious, distinctive, American national culture, the culture that gave birth to Hollywood. Blackface minstrelsy and the myth of the West declared nationalist independence from the Old World. Whereas the political Declaration of Independence made an anticolonial revolution in the name of the equality of all men, the declaration of cultural independence emerged not to free oppressed folk but to constitute national identity out of their subjugation. White supremacy, white over black and red, was the content of this national culture; its form was black and red over white, blacking up and Indianization: "The wilderness . . . strips off the garments of civilization and arrays [the colonist] in the hunting shirt and moccasin," wrote Frederick Jackson Turner. "The outcome is . .. a new product that is American."' So much is indisputable in spite of political agendas that would wish American history away. How to understand the conflicted relations that the history of the United States ought to force on our attention? Relations between equality and white supremacy, politics and culture, racial domination and racial desire, the two Declarations of Independence-so much is legitimately contested ground. It is the ground on which must rest any discussion of affirmative action. Both the political and cultural Declarations of Independence crossed racial lines, the latter displaying the racialized bodies whited out beneath the former's universalist claims. "That old Declaration of Independence" extended what Abraham Lincoln called "the father of all moral principle" to those not "descended by blood from our ancestors."2 Speaking for equality, the Declaration promised that immigrants could become Americans and black could turn white. Minstrelsy, showing that for some Americans blackness was only skin deep, allowed whites to turn black and back again. Whether one understands blackface as the alternative to the Declaration or the return of its repressed, the two forms together provided Americans with an imagined community, a national home. But the forms that transported settlers and immigrants beyond their Old World identities rested on

Abstract: THERE WAS THE SENSE OF VIOLATION, of course. At the bidding of a governor anxious to ride the race issue to the White House, the Board of Regents of the University of California, against the opposition of faculty, students, and administration, over the vigorous protests of chancellors and demonstrators, voted to end affirmative action at the premier public institution of the nation's most demographically diverse state.' The first major public university to do so. July 20, 1995. At a stroke, the landscape of higher education had changed. Assumptions about race and ethnicity that had for decades guided policy were suddenly stripped of the armor of institutional inevitability. They were rent open, open to recuperation, revision, repudiation, whatever the newly emerging politics of a dawning era would decree. Stung by this eruption of history, the editors of Representations present this special issue devoted to exploring the new terrain.

Abstract: FOR THOSE OF US WHO, prior to the Regents' resolution of 20 July 1995, did not believe that the University of California's commitment to affirmative action could be revoked, the current dismantling of affirmative action criteria in admissions policies has introduced epistemic crisis into the understanding of the University's political culture. When I came to the Berkeley campus of the University of California in 1993, it seemed to me that I was entering an academic culture schooled in the lessons of affirmative action and that the institution and the culture of affirmative action were indissociable from each other; in other words, it was impossible to think of Berkeley except as an academic culture formed in part through policies of affirmative action. The Regents' resolution inaugurated a sense of institutional dislocation, a sense of not knowing where I was, and a need to reclaim some sense of my political and cultural bearings. As some of my minority undergraduates filed in to register their opinion on the matter of affirmative action, however, I realized that another discourse was filtered through this one, displacing the affirmative action debate onto one that concerns precisely the culture that they understand affirmative action to have produced, one based on the politics of identity and, in particular, practices of exclusionary identity politics. "Wait!" I wanted to yell, hoping still to separate the issues, but for some of these students, the issue had already congealed into the following form: only as freshmen, they told me, did students from various cultural and racial backgrounds hang out together in and out of class. But sometime during the sophomore year, the pressure to acquire and affiliate with an identity category became insurmountable. Sometimes this demand to affiliate took specifically political forms, but for the most part it was exercised in less overt ways. One student suggested that the campus culture produced the situation in which ethnic identities became mandatory. What disoriented me most was that these were students who were fans ofJesse Jackson, positioned at the left margin of liberalismor even to the left of liberalism-and who sought a different sense of multicultural community than the one they saw encoded in, and produced by, affirmative action policy. The kind of multiculturalism to which they aspired would not be reducible to the stringing together of various forms of separatist identity politics. How is it that affirmative action became, for these students, identified with exclusionary identity positions? And is there a way of reading their response that gives some insight into the cultural disposition of the Regents and their supporters? The students' reasoning seems to go like this: affirmative action appears to

Abstract: I N A P RI L O F 1 9 7 8, C O M E D I AN Steve Martin appeared on Saturday Night Live to perform for the first time his song "King Tut," which subsequently became a hit single, selling more than a million records. Martin's song was a parodic commentary on "Tutmania," the fascination with the ancient Egyptian king Tutankhamun that swept the United States in 1977 and 1978, when a collection of objects from Tutankhamun's tomb toured six American museums. "The Treasures of Tutankhamun" became the most popular museum show in U.S. history, and King Tut became a popular culture sensation, featured in television specials, coffee-table books, and memorabilia ranging from Tut statues to calendars to key rings. One company even sold a T-shirt for women that had a photo of Tut's gold mask on the front and the oddly defiant slogan underneath: "Keep Your Hands Off My Tuts!" Most commentators on "The Treasures of Tutankhamun" have focused on its role in advancing the blockbuster approach to museum exhibition in the United States. The popularity of the exhibit has been understood, implicitly or explicitly, to be a function of the intrinsically fascinating character of ancient Egypt-of mummies, gold statues, and hieroglyphics. My account tells a different story: I examine "Treasures of Tutankhamun" as a diverse set of representations-newspaper and television accounts, T-shirts and trinkets, books and magazine articles, museum catalogs, and the exhibit itself-that together comprised a significant cultural phenomenon. The Tut phenomenon was striking for two reasons: first, for the intimate relationship it forged between the high-culture world of museum exhibits and the popular traffic in celebrity icons, and second, for the way it became a site of struggle over both the nature of American world power and the domestic politics of race and gender. I read the Tut exhibit as mapping the United States in relation to the Middle East, by incorporating the ancient Egyptians into the construction of a contemporary region, whose borders were marked as permeable to U.S. "interests." As such, Tut was part of the recon-

Abstract: AFFIRMATIVE ACTION NEEDS A coherent theory. The fair evaluation and survival of programs justified in the name of affirmative action require it. But such a theory has proved elusive, largely because the people who support affirmative action disagree among themselves about what it is and why we need it. While the press is filled with pro and con argumentation, little scrutiny has been given to the structure of the remarkable conversation now under way within the ranks of the people who hope that at least some affirmative action programs can be saved. The disagreements that animate this conversation are visible in public discourse only in muted form. In private, they are expressed more candidly. Some acquaintances tell me that affirmative action is good because it promotes cultural diversity within the student body and the faculty. Others ridicule this argument as an example of ethno-racial essentialism, carrying the expectation that culture follows blood. My most adamantly antiessentialist friends make the case for campus affirmative action on a wholly different basis: a need to expand the middle class within certain demographic blocs whose members, because of a prejudice triggered by the physical characteristics that serve to identify these blocs, have been historically prevented from achieving upward social mobility. But this is far from the only point at issue. One colleague will tell me that affirmative action is necessary for police departments but not for universities. What relevance affirmative action may have to higher education, another will interject, applies to student admissions but not to faculty hiring. Yet another colleague, learning that this opinion is held by a mutual friend, will condemn the absent apostate for his outrageous moral conceit ("We don't need it but businesses and cops do? Ha!") and will proclaim faculty hiring to be the symbolic center of the entire affirmative action enterprise. Meanwhile, one voice will support affirmative action in hiring in all labor markets but not in promotions, while another will speak with passion and cite statistics about "glass ceilings." Critics who preach "merit" against affirmative action are being disingenuous, one person will insist, because the merit system in the university amounts to a complex of subjective preferences created by power and privilege. Yet another equally committed advocate of affirmative action will argue that standardized merit criteria should control the bulk of the

Abstract: IT MAY SEEM INAPPROPRIATE, given my title, to start with a photograph that puts us in Paris in 1964, at the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend (fig. 1). Andy Warhol had his first European solo exhibition there, a show he wanted to call "Death in America," though it actually opened under a tamer rubric, bearing only the artist's name. I The Sonnabend exhibition was proof that, only two years after his notorious debut as an "artist" (that show lined up soup can paintings on a shelf, just like soup cans), Warhol had made his name. And he had left his beginnings with Campbell's cans far behind. Even the most glancing description of the paintings shown in Paris-suicides, electric chairs, fatal car crashes, portraits of two women who lost their lives to tainted cans of tuna fish (unlikely saints, they seem literally to fade away, along with the instruments of their martyrdom)explains why such an ambitious and morbid title was the first to come to Warhol's mind. There was only one image where death was not directly pictured, a version of Race Riot of 1963; yet it took pride of place in the installation. Race Riot will have the same status in this essay, and even supplies its subtitle: "Race in America." As in Paris, death is not far away. Warhol produced at least thirteen canvases on this subject, though only three on the wall-sized scale of the one shown at Sonnabend; the group's existence is the reason I offer the blunt assertion: Andy Warhol was a history painter. This is not a notion with much currency, past or present; nor have Warhol's Race Riots been studied before. Yet in this essay I claim that these pictures constitute a special-and specially recalcitrant-category within Warhol's work. Its difference from his other main mode of representation is above all a matter of race. This is my main proposition. Making it stick involves first defining Warhol as a painter in general, the better then to spell out the implications of his foray into the particular genre called history. My argument proceeds from the conviction that our understandings of Warhol's painting and of history painting, and even our grasp on the notion of history, all have something to gain from the result. But above all there is something to be learned about the ways the two key terms work together: about what history painting has been, in the late twentieth century, and how it makes meaning from, or gives meaning to, contemporary events. Some of those meanings, where Warhol was concerned, involve race in America. Like

Abstract: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY HAS frequently been regarded as "the Golden Age of parody in English poetry." This judgment may still seem to find material confirmation in the Victorians' domination of the parody anthologies,' but it is interestingly contradicted by Mikhail Bakhtin's view that parody flourishes in medieval literature and declines thereafter, that "its place in modern literature is insignificant."2 We might dismiss this disagreement as showing only that Bakhtinian and Western conceptions of "parody" are incompatible. But the nature of the incompatibility suggests a containment on our part. This essay privileges a Bakhtinian conception of parody to suggest that, as usually conceived in Western criticism-as genre, as communicative vehicle, and especially as a playful form of "criticism"-parody is a tamed creature.3 In Bakhtin's conception, parody is not a genre but a degree of dialogism; and by virtue both of its dialogism and of its generic indistinctness from nonparodic forms, it functions not as criticism but, to the contrary, as a challenge to critical discernment and authoritative interpretive practice.4 To put this differently, the critical object of Bakhtinian parody is less another text than it is the possibility of interpretation. I investigate here some of the ways in which modern criticism has therefore, in the period of its own institutionalization, sought to contain parody-from legal "parody trials" to contemporary parody theory. But I also conclude that more Bakhtinian parody remains than Bakhtin lets on, and that it survives in the places one least suspects, like the poetry of William Wordsworth.

Abstract: ONCE SHAKESPEARE CRITICISM has come to differentiate, in terms of both reciprocity and division, between the representation of textual meaning and the circumstances of performing practice, no single fixed location of authority can reasonably be assumed in the Elizabethan theater. The dissemination of theatrical authority appears especially significant when it is not exclusively associated with either "author's pen or actor's voice"' but is seen to include the audience as final arbiter of the play's success and future. The process of reception is of course prefigured throughout the text (and the performance) of the play; but with the exception of an occasional chorus, it is in the ending of dramatic transactions that spectators are directly urged to endorse not only the work of "author's pen" but also that of "actor's voice." For the audience itself to be acknowledged as a supreme court of appeal is an authorization that goes beyond that of the representation of dramatic fiction. What is involved is an extradramatic strategy designed to help ensure the play's post-scriptural future. As I shall suggest, the underlying circulation of authority, including the authorization of spectators to recollect, discuss, and reappropriate the performed play after its theatrical transaction is over, is central to what a good many Shakespearean endings are all about. This extradramatic (though not necessarily extratheatrical) extension of authority raises a number of thorny questions. The ending in many plays cannot quite be understood without taking into account significant and partially contradictory ties between the socioeconomic institution of the theater and the more traditional elements in the storytelling culture of Elizabethan England. Although even at the turn of the century relatively viable, this culture of oral memory was already being undermined by various forces of change, among which the spread of print and literacy as well as an expanding market for cultural productions were foremost.2 As, in the words of John Lyly, "trafficke and travell"3 came to affect the provision and even the composition of cultural entertainment, the storytelling propensity of Elizabethan spectators could innovatively be appropriated in the playhouse: it could be used as a medium for dispersing information about, and interest in, further performances, with a view to keeping the play's post-scriptural

Abstract: EAGER TO OUTDO HIS CONSERVATIVE RIVALS, California's Governor Pete Wilson launched his short-lived campaign for the Republican nomination for president with an attack on affirmative action. On 1 June 1995, he issued an executive order urging the University of California and other state institutions to "end preferential treatment and to promote individual opportunity based on merit." Complying with the governor's request, the University of California Board of Regents met on 20 July and decided that, as of January 1997, "race, religion, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin" would not be used "as a criterion for admission to the University or to any program of study."' While the political motivation of its authors is clear, one of the most remarkable features of the Board's policy is that it does not merely repeal affirmative action. Certainly, according to the new rules, the University is obliged to disregard the race, gender, and ethnicity of all its applicants. Yet, if we read the document issued after the Board's meeting, it appears that, contrary to the governor's executive order, individual merit and academic achievement will not be the only criteria for admission to the University of California. Claiming that they are still involved in "academic 'outreach,"' the Regents want to introduce a different type of preferential treatment based on a new set of criteria.2 In their own words, they want to give special consideration to candidates who have "suffered disadvantage economically or in terms of their social environment (such as an abusive or otherwise dysfunctional home or a neighborhood of unwholesome or antisocial influences)."3 Should we understand that the Board's decision aims at instituting a revised form of affirmative action, whereby preferential treatment will be based on low income and underprivileged social environment rather than on race, ethnicity, and gender? Coming from the appointees of a Republican governor, such an emphasis on class difference seems rather incongruous. Today more than ever, conservative rhetoric vehemently rejects the concepts of class struggle and class interest as both inappropriate and divisive notions. Moreover, Republican politicians never fail to accuse their Democratic opponents of preaching class warfare whenever the latter dare to object to fiscal or financial measures favoring the richest segments of the population. It is therefore hard to imagine that a former

Abstract: WHEN WALTER BENJAMIN REFLECTS on Franz Kafka's concern with gesture (Gebdrde),' he links this concern with the Jewish belief that "thou shalt not create an image." This juncture lies at the heart of Kafka's nonrepresentational way of writing stories. Benjamin's tracing of Jewish tradition in Kafka's work reveals a common method of remembering the significance of the past in or through language. If the Jews are the people of the word, and if their history can indeed be symbolized as an exile into textuality, a textuality that keeps alive the written link with God's law, then the Kafka-Benjamin connection may illustrate the linguistic as well as the historical impact of experience on memory. Memory has recently re-emerged as a focus for understanding history, particularly in interdisciplinary discussions in the humanities. The new political developments in Europe have provided momentum for these renewed reflections on how to represent and talk about history. The fall of the Wall, for example, has demanded the reexamination, if not debunking, of representations of national histories in order for a new conception of present and future political/national states to evolve. At the same time, and with the incendiary incidence of the Historikerstreit (historians' debate) in the intellectual press, conferences on the Holocaust have sprung up that are attended not only by academics but also by Holocaust survivors who for the first time find the opportunity to speak out. The Holocaust in this current discourse has raised the problem of how to remember without "profanation-through-representation." Representation, at least in traditional documentary, connotative, or mimetic texts, harbors the danger of forgetting-of emotional forgetting. Shelved in files or frozen in books and pictures, the Holocaust can no longer live on as a profound experience that can change people's lives and ways of thinking; like a "dead letter" it can no longer manifest humanity gone awry. The problem of remembering without images, which necessarily must be a different quality of remembering, has, however, always been central to the Jewish tradition. The prohibition on graven images leaves the meaning of God, and ultimately of human life, open to interpretation. Besides the scriptures, the Torah also consists of a continuous commentary that transforms the original text in the process of translating it into a meaningful comment on the present. Intellectually, and with respect to the current discussion on history, this textual tradition challenges the cognitive containment of experience and anticipates the effort, of the individual or the community, to conceptualize or represent experience after the fact. Jewish tra-

Abstract: IN 1965 PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON, speaking of the unprecedented affirmative action policies he was championing and cognizant of the dissension they would precipitate, stated: "We have to press for them as a matter of right, but we also have to recognize that by doing so, we will destroy the Democratic Party."' Thirty years later, his remarks appear prophetic. While the social and political divisions resulting from affirmative action are not the only reason for the party's end-of-century decline, media evidence during the election year of 1996 continues to suggest that few other causes match affirmative action in its capacity to unsettle the nation's perennially contested political and moral balance.2 What is it about the arguments for and against policies of selective restitution and collective assistance based on immutable physical characteristics that give them the power to affect American politics so deeply? Given the myriad answers offered so far, the near silence on the role theological beliefs and Christian ideologies have played in the struggle over affirmative action is surprising, especially as religious commitment continues to be a major, if not dominant, motivating force in American life.3 With this in mind, this essay attempts an explorationhowever inchoate-of some salient ways in which religious ideas may have come to influence the ongoing debate. The question posed in the title is therefore not meant to be facetious. Indeed, I want to argue that if affirmative action policies are truly illiberal, as most of their opponents assert, they may also have to be considered nonChristian. My line of reasoning rests in part on the close connections that exist between liberalism and Christianity. I nevertheless take note from the start that the links are not evident to those who believe that religion no longer plays (or should play) a critical intellectual or moral role in the public and civic spheres.4 More important, I recognize that these ties are difficult to accept for Americans, most of whom grew up believing that liberalism-with its emphasis on civil equality and freedom of speech and, therefore, its concern with religious freedom and the separation of church and state-is a worldly political and moral philosophy that, though Western in origin, transcends temporal and cultural boundaries. After all, since the eighteenth century much intellectual and political energy has been success-

Abstract: I BEGIN THIS ESSAY ABOUT JORGE Luis BORGES'S "The Garden of Forking Paths," appropriately enough, with a small confession. I am here engaged in a practice of which I generally disapprove: writing professionally on a text in whose language of composition I am illiterate. That a trivial discrepancy between two English translations of "Eljardin de senderos que se bifurcan" started me down this path is a paltry excuse.2 Yu Tsun, whose sworn confession constitutes all but the first paragraph of "The Garden of Forking Paths," has this advice for the "soldiers and bandits" he sees inheriting the world: "Whosoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished, should impose upon himself afuture as irrevocable as the past" (F, 92-93). Typically, Yu places his emphasis squarely on the individual will (in this case, will masquerading as destiny), as if we deliberately chose both our atrocious enterprises and the means of pursuing them. I, on the contrary, seem to have been led by the world's most brilliant (and devious) librarian through certain half-lit stacks without regard to (if not precisely against) my will. I have watched this enterprise gradually come to appear less atrocious and less revocable. Like spying for foreign powers, the scholarly mission can take on a compulsive tinge. I have something of a bibliographical detective story to tell, one that disrupts common assumptions about the nature of texts and their relations to the world they both constitute a part of and purport to document. The burden of my story is that, in reading "The Garden of Forking Paths," we can become characters in another story that is incited and "scripted," if not precisely written, by Borges. Reading this tale (and reading around it), we are encouraged simultaneously, disconcertingly, to replicate and to question Borges's story, the stories of spynarrator-murderer Yu Tsun and Sinologist-metaphysician-corpse Stephen Albert, and the story we inhabit and habitually, blithely, call "history." As readers, we seek the source of a crime; as critic, I have sought the source of a citation. Generically, "The Garden of Forking Paths" is multiply suggestive.3 As a spy thriller, it depends on the forward momentum toward a mysterious but univocal

Abstract: On 5 September 1871 Carl Mauch, an energetic and credulous explorer of central southern Africa, was led along a "long line of tumbled down stones" to "masses of rubble and parts of walls and dense thickets"; the place that was to become known as Great Zimbabwe. In 1956 or 1957 (the record is unclear), a schoolboy exploring the veld several hundred kilometers to the south discovered the sherds of a broken terra-cotta head. The pieces, which fitted easily together, showed two heavily lidded eyes and a nose, clearly part of a human face, now known as the Lydenburg Heads.

Abstract: FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER, my daughter has been interested in the law, possibly because my father, uncle, brother, and cousin are impressive lawyers with an intense appreciation for the law. In high school she took courses in law in which she earned A's, and in her junior year she auditioned for and got on the mock trial team. She did really well on the team; partly because of her efforts her team made it to the finals in the State's competition. It was for her the most educational and social event of her high school experience. Juniors on the mock trial team who audition in their senior year usually make the team again. My daughter had done very well in her junior year, so she auditioned again for the senior year and expected to get on the team. Surprisingly, of all the seniors, including a few black men, she did not make the team. She was devastated. A usually composed young woman who did extremely well in school, she collapsed in tears and was barely able to function. Since her rejection from the team had been so unexpected, I went to her high school to find out how to explain this to her. Had she been terrible in her second audition? I'd been to most parent/teacher meetings. Yet it took me four days to find the teacher/mentor of the mock trial team despite the tens of messages I left him and the fact that I went to her high school on three successive days. I shudder to think of parents who would not have the time to pursue the matter or the confidence to question their child's teacher about the reasons for her "failure." When I did find my daughter's teacher, he told me that she had been very good on the team, but as a black girl, she spoke "too well" for the roles they needed on the present team. They needed blacks to play witnesses, blacks who sounded like "inner-city girls." This was not the first time my daughter had been expected in school to "be" the stereotypical black girl, in other words, a gum-cracking, slurred-speaking, sassy girl-the image, unfortunately, even teachers often have of who black girls are supposed to be. My daughter had found herself during her years in high school to be the only black girl in calculus, and so on. But this was the ultimate blow for her. She'd loved the mock trial team, had devoted hours and hours to it,

Abstract: READERS OF THIS SPECIAL ISSUE MAY WONDER, as some members of the Representations editorial board did, how erudition could be new and what it had to do with this journal in any case. Musty learning, antiquarian lucubrations, scholarly cat's cradles, often useful, sometimes necessary for higher intellectual work-these more or less dismissive connotations come readily enough to mind. But, surely, "new" erudition is an oxymoron? There is a quick and fairly erudite rejoinder from William Hazlitt's essay "On Pedantry": Learning is "the knowledge of that which is not generally known," from which it would follow that the newest learning would be the most arcane knowledge.' Suppose that God (or some surrogate) resides in detail, and the minutiae of erudition would concern large and important matters after all. From these glimmerings of an argument a case could be made, and has been made in one form or another since antiquity. But in keeping with the subject I am going to defer general considerations and turn to specifics. It would be a misrepresentation to do otherwise, if only because this special issue did not spring from some advance plan or program. Some of the essays arrived over the transom, so to speak; others were given to me by my wondrous fellow scholars last year at the Getty Center in Santa Monica. Another was solicited for other purposes by a member of the Representations board; one I pried at the last moment from a Berkeley colleague and friend; one came from the dead through the courtesy of Luce Giard and the translation of Daniel Rosenberg. The bag is mixed, to say the least. Only when it was half-full did I realize what the project was, or might be. The stark choice of relativizing or essentializing dogmas confronting us these days in the academy and even real life had led me to think about possible alternatives in the history of ideas of authenticity and practices of authentication. This history would traverse a true Elysium of old-time erudition that has since become a Dark Wood for critics and historians-or so I was inclined to believe before the papers in this issue came to hand like some latter-day Bibliotheca eruditorum full of intellectual energy and engagement. The table of contents already suggests learned feats of philological, archaeological, and historical detection; analects of bibliolatry and logomachy; juxtapositions of classical studies, Judaica, Egyptology, and Sinology. It will also suggest, to be sure, some editorial sleight of hand on my part to cobble together such seemingly unrelated interests.

Abstract: Believing Californias diversity to be an asset, we adopt this statement: Because individual members of all of Californias diverse races have the intelligence and capacity to succeed at the University of California, this policy will achieve a UC population that reflects this states diversity through the preparation and empowerment of all students in this state to succeed rather than through a system of artificial preferences.'

Abstract: IN THE NINTENDO GAME Populous, the sides compete to outpopulate and thereby destroy each other. If this sounds like a cute reference to popular culture, it's meant instead to suggest that what we have now is a populational culture, one in which nonrational pictures, metaphors, and stories about "populations" (not exactly the same as classes, masses, crowds, and so on) are as important as the words and statistics found for them. Two awkward and opposed phrases-demographic reason and demographic iconography-might suggest the components of this theme. In the standard model of what we now call "demography," statistics and words, or "numbers and notions," as E. A. Wrigley writes, spiral around and criticize each other to produce reliable demographic reasoning. Analysis and synthesis, numbering and classificatory naming, alternate.' Picturing-let alone a poetics of counting-has little or no part in this. Though it's a cliche to debunk statistics, or to notice that the numbers on great issues (genocides, homelessness, how many species become extinct per year) can be wildly discrepant, turning statistics into dialogue, and though there are less well-known discords inside population studies (about the relative primacy of categories like age structure, labor migration, or gender relations), public emphasis still protects "demography" from skepticism, seeing it as a brand of descriptive neutrality and rationality, not of imagination. Graphs and pictures are only assists. The phrase the iconography of demography, besides being comically ugly, doesn't seem to refer to anything real. But the word population(s)-again not simply coextensive as a logical category with crowds, nations, classes, or even masses-has in contemporary rhetoric become the default term for groups in general, seemingly a more neutral term than class or the people, though it conceals major unacknowledged iconic, historical, and linguistic forces. In Anglo-American culture, for example, because of the conflict, which partly hides affinities, between Thomas Malthus and the romantics who hated him (but often shared his taste for sublimely indefinite images of large groups), population imagery remains partly late romantic in its tones. A catchphrase like population explosion, with its repeated plosive ps, has its own romantic metaphorical character. From one angle a form of late romanticism, the "postmodern" is-this definition is polemical and will be implicit throughout this article-the displacement of class thinking and passions by seemingly benign (often