Mapping the global checkpoint

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Acknowledgements

This special issue originated in a seminar we co-organized at the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) annual conference 2012, hosted by Brown University. After an intensive three days exploring, with the other contributors to the issue, literatures and cultures of the checkpoint in global context, our suspicions as to its vast critical potential were confirmed. We could not have found a more fitting venue to publish the results of this inquiry than the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. We would like to thank the editorial team, especially Janet Wilson and Lucienne Loh, for their enthusiasm for the topic as well as for their tireless, exemplary efforts in bringing the issue to fruition. We would also like to thank Patrick Williams for his insight and suggestions as external reader. Of course, our greatest thanks are reserved for our fellow contributors, Emily Apter, Anna Ball, Anna Bernard, Mat Fournier, Chris Garces and Stephen Morton. Starting at the ACLA, their energy for discussion, dedication and sheer hard analytical work has illuminated the checkpoint topic in ways we could not have anticipated. By them, we’d like to dedicate this issue to them as well.

Individually, Dr Fieni would like to thank Emily Apter, whose work on the politics of translation and world literature has remained foundational in his own. He would also like to thank Karim Mattar, for his boundless generosity, his rigorous intellectual acumen and his tireless work coordinating this issue, and Chris Garces, for prompting him to train his critical eye on the checkpoint in the first place.

Dr Mattar would like to thank his co-editor, David Fieni – working with him on the ACLA seminar and then this special issue over the last year-and-a-half has been a constant source of intellectual stimulation, productive exchange, and instruction. He also wishes to thank Elleke Boehmer, his doctoral supervisor at Oxford and an invaluable source of support, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, whose funding of his doctoral research has made working on this issue possible.