This article reads Elizabeth Bishop's poems of the 1950s in their first publishing context, the New Yorker magazine, and in relation to their scene of production, the economic and architectural environments of mid-century Brazil. The New Yorker had an important mediating function in relation to Bishop's own role as cultural go-between, and remains a crucial interpretative context for her poetry's characteristic provisionality and self-ironies. In specifying these material aspects of the outside world in which the Brazil poems were accommodated – the buildings in which they were written and the magazine in which they were published – the article offers a new perspective on the questions of belonging that lie at the heart of Bishop's unsettled poetics, and so on the politics of her writing at mid-century.

This essay attempts to show how contemporary South Asian American theater deals with a wide range of South Asian American experience and in so doing has created a “new aesthetic” within American theater. The South Asian American experience is a diaspora experience, but in the contemporary wider sense of the term. The plays under study are about the old and new home, about people assimilating into the mainstream or navigating between two cultures or even negotiating a transnational identity. They deal with contested ideas of nation, nationality and allegiance, and also explore the South Asian female body in the new culture. Central to my study are the works of emerging South Asian American playwrights. I have carefully chosen a full-length play by each of them, two only in the case of short plays, and paired them under separate rubrics in such a way as to argue how they represent the diverse yet connected, changing yet pervasive, historical, cultural and psychological tropes of the South Asian American diaspora. The essay, however, does not claim that the body of work chosen for the current essay – or the rubrics, for that matter – fully expresses “South Asian America” or its theater.

This essay considers how place matters in Zadie Smith's most recent novel, On Beauty (2005). I focus on the ways the presence of Haitian immigrants in her fictional “Wellington” reflect an urge to make meaning out of social relations in the city that inspired the novel. I argue that even her most clichéd Haitian characters should not be read as casual insertions that merely introduce dramatic irony. More than any of the local details, Haitians authenticate Smith's imagined geography. They establish both the (historical) time and place (or context) of her novel and enable On Beauty to illuminate important features of contemporary urban inequality, complex black diasporan relations, and the ironies of America's celebrated post-racial society. I conclude that – although many of her Haitian characters are stereotypical and her representation of Boston is partial – imaginative ethnographies such as Smith's challenge scholarly claims to privileged readings of the city.

This article seeks to rebalance historical assessment of the debate between “pathologists” and “anti-pathologists” which dominated discussions of black urban life in the United States during the 1960s, and which continues to shape ideas about race and the urban environment today. The heated disagreement between the social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark (1914–2005) and the critic and novelist Albert Murray (1916–) presents an opportunity to consider not only the pitfalls and unintended consequences of pathologist representations of black urban life, which have received much attention from scholars in recent years, but also the problematic aspects of anti-pathologist discourse, which have largely been overlooked. The dispute between Clark and Murray also illuminates the intense competition among some African American intellectuals to claim the personal authenticity and disciplinary authority to define and represent black urban life – and to adjudicate the authenticity and authority of others.

In March and April of 2008, emo youth in Mexican and Latin American metropoles were vulnerable to violent, physical attacks, which the world witnessed, aghast, via YouTube. Journalists, pundits, and cultural commentators around the globe wondered, first, how to define “emo”; second, how to explain its presence in Mexico and Latin America; and third, whence such a violent reaction? This essay tackles those questions, and tries to think through emo to something more than the post-NAFTA angst to which it has been commonly ascribed in the US and Mexican media. Tracing a route from US Chicano punk and new wave, to Mexico's self-proclaimed emo youth, to Myriam Gurba's short fiction featuring southern California's Chicana dyke-punk communities, I ask how emo travels, and how these highly self-conscious and very public performances of affect speak to the intersections of race and gender in twenty-first-century Latin@ and Latin American youth culture.