For a time, some 20 years ago, there was another book called Being Contemporary. Like this one, that volume consisted of a series of critical interventions into literature, visual art, and politics, straddling the domains of French and comparative literature, and suffused with an awareness of history and its impact on the contemporary moment. Although its original, working title was changed at the last minute, the first Being Contemporary would nonetheless enjoy an afterlife well known to scholars in the field, and to the contemporaries, students, and compagnons de route of its author, the eminent scholar Susan Rubin Suleiman. Published by Harvard University Press in 1994 under the title Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature, Suleiman's collection of essays brought together a diverse group of cultural productions—from the art of Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, and Frida Kahlo to the writings of Simone de Beauvoir and Hélène Cixous—all refracted through questions of creativity, motherhood, and postmodernity. Risking charted the shifting landscape of literary and cultural criticism, as well as the evolving conventional definitions of what it means to be a ‘good’ scholar and writer. Having assessed the impact of structuralism's waning authority and the rise of ‘self-conscious’ or ‘personal’ criticism, Suleiman took the risk of writing a deeply personal book, one whose critical gestures and scholarly analyses cohabit with (and are often inspired by) reflections on her own existence, on the very self ‘at risk’ in the processes of creating and writing.

If the title Risking Who One Is was ultimately favored both by Suleiman and her editors, the shift lightly veils a significant facet of the book: the intervention it makes into the very notion of ‘the contemporary’ as a temporal marker, as a state of existence, and as a relational notion. Indeed, in her introduction ‘The Risk of Being Contemporary,’ Suleiman proposes ‘being contemporary’ as a heuristic category for assessing the role of the scholar and critic, for studying the current moment in literature, art, and culture, and for engaging with historical and philosophical questions in a way that resonates with readers in the present day.