CONTENTS

1. Peter Gowan: US : UN The American origins of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, and the duality of US usages and conceptions of it ever since: from the Cold War through the collapse of the USSR to today’s war on terror and occupation of Mesopotamia.
2. Roberto Schwarz: Preface with Questions Portrait of one of Latin America’s most original sociologists, and the zoography of his native habitat. The calm iconoclasm of Francisco de Oliveira’s thought under military dictators and workers’ president alike.
3. Francisco de Oliveira: The Duckbilled Platypus What animal species does contemporary Brazil most resemble? The strange forms of a society that no longer enjoys the options of under-development, without acquiring the dynamics of globalized development, in the liveliest exploration to date of the possible meaning of Lula’s government.
4. Tariq Ali: Remembering Edward Said The physical and moral courage of a unique writer, and fighter—leading Arab intellectual, unconforming cultural theorist, champion of the Palestinian cause in the heartland of Israeli overseas power.
5. Franco Moretti: Graphs, Maps, Trees - 1 The first of three essays setting out to demonstrate the power of abstract models to revolutionize our understanding of literary history. What do the quantitative curves of novel production tell us about the interplay of markets, politics, sexes, generations, in the life and death of literary forms?
6. Christopher Prendergast: Codeword Modernity Reflections on Fredric Jameson’s narratology of modernity, and current attempts to reinstate it as a master category of the time, requiring no suspect prefixes. The political dialectic behind such impulses of restoration, and the artistic practices which prepared them.
7. Patrick O'Brien: The Myth of Anglophone Succession How far are the systems of British and American international power historically comparable? Can the imperium presided over by Clinton and Blair be regarded as essentially a sequel to the Victorian order guided by Palmerston or Salisbury, or does it represent something quite new—the first true hegemony in history?
8. Georgi Derluguian: Under Fond Western Eyes Georgi Derluguian on Andrew Meier, Black Earth: A Journey through Russia after the Fall. The sociology of Western affections for Russian anomie, and standard explanations of current suffering.
9. Efrain Kristal: Lessons from the Golden Age Efraín Kristal on Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale. Crossing the arts of autobiography, politics and fiction in the Caribbean littoral.
10. Tony Wood: Tropical Vanguards Tony Wood on David Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910–1990. Painters, writers and political upheavals in Mexico, Cuba and Nicaragua.