Touraj Atabaki is professor of social history of the Middle East and Central Asia at the University of Leiden and senior research fellow at the International Institute of Social History. He is the author ofAzerbaijan: Ethnicity and the Struggle for Power in Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993) andBeyond Essentialism: Who Writes Whose Past in the Middle East and Central Asia? (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2003); editor ofPost-Soviet Central Asia (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998); coeditor, with Erik Jan Zürcher, ofMen of Order: Authoritarian Modernization in Turkey and Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004); and coeditor, with Sanjyot Mehendale, ofCentral Asia and the Caucasus: Trans-nationalism and Diaspora (London and New York: Routledge, 2005),Iran and the First World War: Battleground of the Great Powers (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), andThe State and the Subaltern: Society and Politics in Turkey and Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007). His current work focuses on historiography of everyday life and comparative subaltern history.

Caroline Brown is assistant professor of English at the University of Montreal. A comparatist, she concentrates on twentieth-century American literature and the literature of the African diaspora, particularly in their intersection with critical race theory, women's writing, and aesthetics. Her articles have appeared inAfrican American Review, Obsidian, and theNational Women's Studies Association Journal. She is currently completing "Art and Survival: Performing Identity in Black Women's Literature," which examines how aesthetics and performance practices mediate the expression of identity and political resistance.

Ngwarsungu Chiwengo is associate professor of English at Creighton University. A native of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she combines her academic pursuits with active involvement in the politics of eastern Congo. Her work has appeared inSouth Atlantic Quarterly, Journal of Black Studies, Research in African Literature, College Literature, Academic Exchange Quarterly, andLa Revue de L'Université de Moncton. In her bookUnderstanding "Cry, the Beloved Country" (Greenwood Press, 2007), she analyzes the literary and historical background of Alan Paton's 1948 novel about racial tensions in South Africa. Her current interest is genocide literature.

Ziad Fahmy is assistant professor of Near Eastern studies at Cornell University. His research interests include the growth of Egyptian nationalism, colloquial Arabic mass culture, and the effects of diglossia in Egypt and the Arab world. He is currently working on a book manuscript based on his dissertation, tentatively titled "Creating Egyptians: Colloquial Culture, Media Capitalism, and the Growth of National Identity, 1870–1919."

Nouri Gana is assistant professor of comparative literature and Near Eastern languages and cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published numerous articles and chapters in, among others,American Imago, Mosaic, Law and Literature, ARIEL, College Literature, Theory & Event, James Joyce Quarterly, and, most recently, "Bourguiba's Sons: Melancholy Manhood in Modern Tunisian Cinema" inMasculinity in Middle Eastern Literature and Film (Routledge, 2008). He is currently at work on a book on the affective politics of Arab contemporaneity, tentatively titled "Arab Melancholia: Toward an Affective Theory of Cultural Empowerment," and is editing a collection of critical essays on the intellectual history and contemporary significance of the Arab novel in English, "The Rise of the Arab Novel in English: The Politics of Anglo Arab and Arab American Literature and Culture."

Heike Härting is assistant professor of postcolonial and Canadian literatures at the Université de Montréal. Her research focuses on diaspora and globalization studies with a particular interest in the politics of humanitarianism and death in cultural discourses of localized transnational warfare. Among her recent publications is "Global Violence and Political Legitimacy in Sri Lankan Narratives of Ethnic Civil War" (forthcoming), inUnsettled Legitimacy: Political Community, Power, and Authority in a Global Era, ed. Steven Bernstein and William Coleman (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008). She has recently finished her book manuscriptUnruly Metaphor: Nation, Body, and Diaspora in Contemporary[End Page 221]Fiction in English Canada (University of Toronto Press). She published articles and interviews inARIEL, Third Text, andStudies in Canadian Literature and is presently working on her second book, tentatively titled "Postcolonial Politics of Failure: Humanitarianist Capital, Western Cinema, and the Global Production of Africa...