I am proposing the staging of five critical conversations in the original context of the American academy in the United States. My interlocutors are Walter D. Mignolo, John Beverley, Rolena Adorno, José Rabasa and Roberto González Echevarría. These are undoubtedly five influential names whose scholarly work asks for re-readings and re-framings as we look both ways, that is, toward the immediate past, the 1980s onwards, and the more distant past, Early Modern/colonial times, and to be sure toward the ominous future inside the few embedded fragilities, institutional and otherwise, of a present crisis informing the foreign humanities. This precarity is true state of affairs in the United States and elsewhere, but I want to focus, for now, on the troubles of the super-power and its tentacular institutions of higher learning inside which we must imagine these five noted names. By foreign humanities, I mean to invoke the double consciousness of DuBois-pedigree that takes into account the insufficiencies of the immediate, native, hegemonic or mainstream, dominant-national official circumstance inside which an emergence of a possibly different and desirable foreign dimension or horizon may take place (”extranjero” and “extranjerizante” in Spanish within and against conventionally xenophobic frames of intelligibility, also present inside university settings). Affirmations of foreignness must therefore make any form of nativism incomplete and undesirable. This is one book, and there are two others that should follow soon.

What I am doing here? I am seeking critical “humanistic” intelligence and one thousand thoughts and feelings wrapped around myriad avatars of university life in our tumultuous times. The time frame begins in the 1980s and reaches us today. Things come out when things come out, and some of these conversations have selectively surfaced partially previously or not at all in the previous two decades. Three took place in Spanish (Mignolo, Rabasa, González Echevarría), and two in English (Beverley, Adorno). The website of the book for Anthem Press includes the original audios [The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect (anthempress.com)]. Both versions (print and audio) will play, I am sure, in the bilingual imagination of those invested in translation and interpretation studies, but this is only the beginning. There is so much more: a rich landscape of scholarship and criticism in the foreign humanities in the vicinity of the Hispanophone sectors within, and perhaps against Anglophone hegemonies.