This essay examines the turn to a discourse of sustainable development through two novels by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Devil on the Cross (1980) and Wizard of the Crow (2004). Looking at the specific characters, images, and plotlines from Devil on the Cross that are reworked in Wizard of the Crow, the essay traces the shifts in Ngũgĩ’s thinking on development and the environment across the roughly twenty years separating the two novels. Mapping these moments of rewriting onto the history of sustainable development, which emerged in the same period as a kind of rewriting of prior development paradigms, the essay shows how Ngũgĩ’s literary response to environmental crisis exposes the fantastical modes of thinking at the heart of sustainable development; it also provides a vision of sustainability that challenges mainstream conceptions of what solutions are considered to be—in the words of the mandate given to the World Commission on Environment and Development—“realistic.”

This essay examines the portrayal of the plum-stone game in two works of literature from Great Plains Native authors: Susette La Flesche’s “Nedawi” (1881) and Zitkála-Šá’s “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” (1900). By analyzing these depictions of the traditional game, I explore the intersections of chance, Indigenous childhood, and cultural assimilation in the late nineteenth century. I argue that these two authors used the plum-stone game to represent the effects of American encroachment and allotment as the theft of play. Correspondingly, they reveal the significance of games in Indigenous literature, a topic often neglected by critics. By tying together ethnographic readings of the plum-stone game and historical information about Great Plains tribes with close readings of the texts, this essay offers new insights into how play intersects with and is haunted by settler incursion.

This article emerges from the project Reading at University, undertaken in collaboration with Christina Lupton, which has collected material from academics and students in Denmark and the United Kingdom about their reading habits, practices, and time use. Building on previous studies of time use in the university, this project specifically investigates the interconnected issues of when and why reading happens in the humanities today. While researchers in all disciplines read as part of their professions, it is in subjects such as English, history, and philosophy that it is the absolute key to the successful production and transmission of knowledge. The project’s qualitative approach has allowed for an examination of the reading that underpins the production of literary criticism, the present-day processes and stages that make any method or approach possible. Such a qualitative study of reading brings much needed detail and nuance to the so-called method wars and to discussions of the profession of literary criticism.

This study reveals the paragraph’s complexity but limited aesthetic contribution. The general question of the ornament’s part in the work of art (through which Jacques Derrida challenges Immanuel Kant) frames the subject and extends previous inquiry on punctuation. Through Charles Peirce I discover three kinds of relations that paragraph divisions emphasize for the reader: autonomy, contrast, and pattern. Two passages from Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet demonstrate the normal order and wayward play of these relations. The novel’s opening passage mixes genres to create a multilayered pastiche of Genesis and naturalism, while the third chapter satirizes a chemistry textbook and reflects on the molecular structure of narration. My formal reading indicates how paragraph indentations ornament a beautifully ironic play of relations that ultimately springs from language and not from the material page.

The African city has emerged as a robust site of intellectual work in literary and cultural studies in the past two decades. Scholarship on African cities has centered poetics of the city, foregrounding urban agency across Africa. But what if one shifts attention from poetics of the city to poetics for the city? Reading Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness, this essay explores the dynamics of this prepositional shift, with attention to their significance for exploring the relations among resource extraction, African storytelling, and world literature. I argue that this prepositional shift becomes necessary for understanding extractive economies in these texts as allegories for the aesthetic compromises the city demands of the countryside in Africa and that the world demands of its countryside—Africa. Poetics for the city—characterized by narrative inflation and denial of agency—provides a critical vocabulary for reappraising world literature.

This essay tests the animal and bestial limits of posthumanist thought by gauging the nonhuman and inhuman grounds of three Chinese language texts: the 1918 essay 人的文学 (“Humane Literature”), by Zhou Zuoren (周作人); the 2013 novel 荒潮 (Waste Tide), by Chen Qiufan (陈楸帆); and the 2006 novel 异兽志 (Strange Beasts of China), by Yan Ge (颜歌). Nearly one hundred years separate Zhou’s essay from Chen’s and Yan Ge’s science fictional novels. I bring these works together here because their understandings of the human and posthuman are haunted by competing conceptions of the nonhuman and inhuman—the biomachinic animal and the dispositional beast. These figures show how and when the differentiating promises of posthumanism (Chinese or otherwise) fail to cohere, both narratively and as an underlying critical logic.

This article examines the twentieth-century Macau-based poet Camilo Pessanha’s contribution to the Portuguese tradition of maritime literature, an inheritance that writers increasingly mobilized in service of the nationalist project in turn-of-the-century Portugal. Pessanha seized on fluid citational practices that were already latent in iconic lusophone maritime works like Luís de Camões’s Os Lusíadas to awaken the tradition from its late-imperial slumber and recover its sensory primacy. Pessanha’s creative metabolization of works by authors such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Charles Baudelaire overlaid French notions of ennui and ship image onto his nautical lyric, opening up a proverbial sea route for later Portuguese modernists, including Fernando Pessoa. From Pessanha’s Franco-Portuguese literary confluence emerges a blue poetics of citation—a poetics that affirms, in a postcolonial key, the fluid and transnational intertextualities inherent to literary seafaring.

This essay uncovers the significant yet surprisingly overlooked role Indigenous knowledge played in Henry David Thoreau’s posthumously published studies of ecology and seasonal phenomena. First, I demonstrate how Thoreau begins to take Indigenous epistemologies seriously as a way of enhancing his studies of natural history thanks to his reciprocal exchange of knowledge with Joe Polis (Penobscot) during their travels through the Maine woods. Next, I show how Thoreau uses the French Jesuit Sébastien Rale’s eighteenth-century Abenaki dictionary to translate his understanding of Penobscot knowledge into what I call a “perceptual grammar,” which allows him to notice previously imperceptible patterns of ecological and seasonal relations. Finally, I examine how this perceptual grammar shapes a threefold ethical, political, and epistemological practice that Thoreau calls “going a-berrying.” A concluding section connects Thoreau’s late writings to the relationship between sovereignty and blueberry picking among members of the Wabanaki Confederacy that continues to this day.

This essay considers the “spectacle” or “rupture” of D/deafness and the politics of staring by way of an analysis of Ilya Kaminsky’s third collection of poems, Deaf Republic. It further places the collection and the author’s identity in the political context of the ongoing Ukrainian-Russian conflict, drawing connections between D/deaf community formation and Ukrainian identity by analyzing the use of language as a method of resistance.

This essay reexamines the Caribbean mother trope in Anglophone Afro-Caribbean poetry and demonstrates how poets’ metapoetic practices in their maternal figurations cultivate a located literariness. Specifically, I investigate Kamau Brathwaite’s and Lorna Goodison’s revisionary poems, showing how they capitalize on and nurture mother-island symbolism through a foregrounded textuality or artistic reflection. Brathwaite reinvents his mother poems to enact a recursive textuality of locatedness. Goodison reconfigures mothers to magnify their art-cultivating roles, thereby affirming the brilliance of local arts that will in turn confer recognition on the Caribbean locale. Departing from a gender-focused approach that highlights Caribbean women poets’ subversion of postcolonial patriarchal archetypes, my reading illuminates the two poets’ kinship and continuity in nourishing a local Caribbean tradition through an ecology of revision. Ultimately, I demonstrate the significance of revision as a self-reflexive dimension of a Caribbean poetics of place and contemplate how postcolonial literature fosters a located literariness.

In 1974, Edward Kamau Brathwaite published his much-cited essay “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature” in the journal Daedalus. A little-known aspect of the essay’s history is that it also heralded the end of Brathwaite’s friendship with the Panamanian-Jamaican writer Andrew Salkey. Their friendship, integral to the influential Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), never recovered from Brathwaite’s piece, which contained a strongly critical passage on Salkey’s 1959 novel, A Quality of Violence. What follows is the letter Brathwaite wrote to his aggrieved friend on 9 May 1974, shortly after the essay appeared. A poignant mix of apology and defensiveness, the letter is also a position paper that explains Brathwaite’s coinage and practice of “communal/impersonal” criticism (Brathwaite, Letter to John La Rose, 15 Mar. 1975; Brathwaite, Letter to Andrew Salkey, 9 May 1974).

The voluble abortionist at the center of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Dr. Matthew O’Connor, has been variously read as a transsexual, as a transgender woman, and as an effeminate gay man. Resisting the urge to classify him according to existing categories of gender or sexuality, this essay theorizes his gender transitivity through a title he gives himself: gourmet. Gourmandise offers the doctor ways of knowing, feeling, and being that are directly opposed to the medical methods we might expect of a doctor—including those of sexology—by centering desire and pleasure. Building out from a close reading of the passage in which Dr. O’Connor gives voice to his gourmandise, I demonstrate how the philosophy of gourmandise—as articulated in the very edition of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste that Barnes herself owned—organizes the doctor’s gender transitivity, and I argue more broadly for the necessity of reading for bespoke methodologies of gender.

John Ashbery’s long poem “The Skaters” can be understood as an exploration of entropy, a multivalent concept that originated in nineteenth-century thermodynamics and had recently gained widespread cultural currency when Ashbery wrote the poem, first in the emergent postwar discourse of information theory and then in its application to a wide array of social and artistic phenomena. This article positions Ashbery’s poem as a reflection of the postwar period, when energy and information overlapped, with entropy linking the two. The poem’s thematics of entropy becomes a structural metaphor for the poem itself as its production of meaning becomes subjected to steady decay; in the entropic poetics prominently on display in “The Skaters,” unassimilable excess and semantic drift are precisely the point as the poem itself becomes an exercise in entropy, a nonproductive form of transfer that privileges waste, scattering, and dissipation over coherence.

It is difficult to categorize a figure as enigmatic as Abū al-Qāsim al-Shābbī (1909–34). In the early 1900s, the Tunisian poet engaged both evolving anticolonial, liberationist thought and European philosophical and poetic influences. He was a language purist and a fierce defender of classical prosody. Yet he considered himself a visionary modernizer, distinct from traditionalists in the Arabic literary sphere (Omri 294; Ostle 2). He was shaped by an Islamic education at the Zaytūna but was also influenced by French and English Romanticism, which he encountered in translation through the Ṣādiqiyya and Khaldūniyya libraries (Ostle 1–2).1 His brief life and works, which include poems, criticism, letters, lectures, and private memoirs, suggest an intellectual dynamism and interdisciplinary awareness that deserve further critical attention. He is remembered today for revolutionary poetry that combines romantic imagery with a progressive vision of Tunisian life and literature (Husni). Many of his poems have circulated past his lifetime—especially “Irādat al-ḥayāt” (1933; “The Will to Life”) and “Ila ṭughāt al-‘ālam” (1934; “To the Tyrants of the World”), the lines of which were chanted and inscribed on signs and walls during the 2010–12 Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings.

Anne Carson’s 2016 collection Float recruits Gertrude Stein and her concept of “identity” to rethink relationships between critical and creative genres. Stein recognized that identity is configured in our relationships with others. In Float, Carson suggests how grammar and genre create possible identities by establishing modes of relation among speakers and addressees, writers and readers. Relating, however, requires the emotional condition that I have called “reverie,” after object relations psychoanalysis—that is, an openness to making connections, to forming identity. By modeling “reverie” in her creative-critical writing about Stein, Carson demonstrates an alternative approach to reading and interpreting Stein’s difficult, famously inexplicable works, such as “If I Told Him.” Reverie can be understood as a method of reading that might also be incorporated into critical writing as a tool for understanding the relationship between (for example) a lecturer and an audience.

Francisco “Pancho” Villa is often said to have led the only invasion of the continental United States since the Civil War. Of course, such statements overlook many acts of armed resistance on the part of Native nations, but, just as egregiously, they ignore another crucial chapter of the Mexican Revolution. In the year preceding Villa’s 9 March 1916 assault on Columbus, New Mexico, men such as Agustín Solis de la Garza waged a guerilla war in South Texas. Taking aim at the twinned forces of capitalist dispossession and racial discrimination, these so-called Sediciosos (“Seditionists”) spent the summer of 1915 attacking everything from ranches to railways. Into the fall, the Sediciosos were able to hide in Tamaulipas, but that winter, US officials coerced their Mexican counterparts into collaborating on the counterinsurgency. Within months, Texas Rangers and US soldiers thus defeated the Sediciosos; thirsty for vengeance, these forces then spent the following years slaughtering thousands of other Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

The document published here for the first time, “Group Life and Literature,” is an unfinished late essay by Claude McKay, the vagabond poet and enfant terrible of the Harlem Renaissance.1 Although no date is given on the typescript or on the folder in which it resides at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, it was probably written in 1938 or 1939. The reference to Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, which was published in 1938, as a “recent startling phenomenon,” added by hand on the typescript, means that at least this annotation could not have been made earlier. Despite being professional rivals at the time, notably in their conflicting relations to the Communist Party, McKay and Wright were then both part of the Federal Writers’ Project and worked together in the FWP’s New York City offices (see Cooper 362). As a New Deal program launched by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) agency, the FWP ran from 1936 to 1940 and provided life-sustaining employment to thousands of established and emerging US writers during the latter half of the Great Depression, including, among many others, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Richard Durham, Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, Dorothy West, and a young Ralph Ellison (who also worked at the New York branch).