This special issue addresses one current of this work: oceanic studies.  This maritime turn, to some degree, is born of what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the overlapping processes of globalization and global warming. In modern European history, the sea is both the “blank space” through which traders and explorers conquered and mapped the globe and a non-human actant, whose vast material presence is irreducible to human appropriation.  With the naming of the Anthropocene—and with its oceanic consequences (rising sea levels, melting ice, ocean acidification, unprecedented storms, and mass extinction events) human-centered history and the oceanic geological force have become irrevocably braided together.  The maritime turn asks us to consider the textualization of the waters—the submerged histories, aesthetics, and ontologies of “heavy waters” (DeLoughrey)—along with the altered temporal and spatial scales, geographies, and agencies of the nonhuman sea, and to imagine new ways of connecting the two.

This special issue investigates the intersections among Latinx, Chicanx, ethnic, and hemispheric American Studies, mapping the history of Latinx and Latin American literary and cultural production as it has circulated through the United States and the Americas. The issue comprises original archival research on Latinx print culture, modernismo, and land grabs, as well as short position pieces on the relevance of “Latinx” both as a term and as a field category for historical scholarship, representational politics, and critical intervention. Taken as a whole, the issue interrogates how Latinx literary, cultural, and scholarly productions circulate across the Americas in the same ways as the lives and bodies of Latinx peoples have moved, migrated, or mobilized throughout history.

Critical and Comparative Mysticisms (56.1)
56.1, April 2018

This special issue of ELN invited contributions on Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticisms, including mystical practices and beliefs, mystical writings, the culture of mysticism, and mystics themselves...

Environmental Trajectories (55.1/2)
55.1/2, Fall 2017, TOC

ELN announces a new volume bringing together scholars in the humanities to critically engage current trajectories in the burgeoning area of environmental humanities...

In/Security (54.2)
54.2, Fall/Winter 2016

As Itty Abraham notes, the term “security” is a “traveling signifier” that has “attached itself to every scale of human activity, from the individual to the international, even to outer space; from comestible (food security), natural (environmental security), financial (security/securities), and territorial (homeland security) to virtual (cyber security); to forms of community, from Social Security to collective security, which is the principle behind the United Nations.”

Secure Sites
54.1, Spring/Summer 2016

Drones, GPS, digital surveillance, profiling, risk assessment, and medical diagnostics: these are some of the practices that circulate biopower globally. But what are their historical antecedents?

Medieval Materiality
53.2, Fall/Winter 2015

Bones, parchment, birthmarks, fossils, angels, crowns, the Eucharist: these are some of the materials of the Middle Ages.  As windows into a...

Sexing the Left
53.1, Spring/Summer 2015

Sex is everywhere – even on the left. Then why have many of us been so heedless of its presence there, or so reluctant to acknowledge it? Even in...

Cartographies of Dissent
52.2, Fall/Winter 2014

In recent years, the transitive practice of “worlding” literary studies has often, implicitly or explicitly, presupposed a globalized cartography. Global...

Imaginary Cartographies
52.1, Spring/Summer 2014

In recent decades the map has emerged as a key site of cultural and imaginative reworking, and yet the history of such...