Introducing this collection of essays, Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih argue that looking back--investigating the historical, intellectual, and political entanglements of contemporary academic disciplines--offers a way for scholars in the humanities to move critical debates forward. They describe how disciplines or methodologies that seem distinct today emerged from overlapping intellectual and political currents in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the era of decolonization, the U.S. civil rights movement, and antiwar activism. While both American ethnic studies programs and "French theory"...