Whereas the previous chapter traced the early debates between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois over the proper strategies for African American advancement – between Washington’s emphasis on vocational training and gradual assimilation and Du Bois’s call for the “talented tenth” to lead in social and political uplift – the Harlem Renaissance represents a new, more experimental phase of African American thought. Concentrated in Harlem during the 1920s, this movement produced groundbreaking literature, art, and music that explored the meaning of Black identity, freedom, and creativity. Figures like Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and George Schuyler interrogated existing social norms while celebrating the distinctiveness of Black culture. Locke’s philosophy of cultural pluralism emphasized that African American culture was not a problem to be solved but a source of inherent value, teaching readers how culture can shape identity and influence broader societal understanding. Magazines like Fire!!! and works such as Jean Toomer’s Cane and Nella Larsen’s Passing pushed narrative boundaries, illustrating the ways in which art can challenge assumptions about race, gender, and desire.

There is perhaps no greater anathema to the vocational attitude of George MacDonald than the concept of solitary genius. Implicit in the rural community of his youth, the explicit teaching and practice of such relational theology by key mentors further shaped MacDonald’s own practice. His web of friendships grew notably broad, a compendium of illustrious names from multiple countries, in addition to many obscure figures from a mix of classes and cultures. His keenness to share such friends – be they voices on a page or present in the flesh – is a signature of his craft and scholarship that warrants closer attention. This chapter considers a range of these relationships, from his mentors A. J. Scott and F. D. Maurice to Victorian critics John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and many more. A fundamental aspect of MacDonald’s significance to the Victorian era is that this commitment to relationships impacted not only his own work but the lives and works of many notable Victorians.

Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s magnum opus Leg over Leg (al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq, 1855) is perhaps the most important work of Arabic literature from the nineteenth century. It laid the foundation for modernist Arabic prose at once rooted in Arabic literature's classical forms, language, and genres and pushed them to innovative and modern critical ends. Despite al-Shidyāq’s unprecedented redirection of the forms of classical Arabic literature to modern critical ends, Leg over Leg and the roots of Arabic literary modernity and modernist prose it sprouted were systematically marginalized to the point that by the mid twentieth century they had become largely irrelevant and forgotten. This chapter outlines how twentieth-century literary critics covered up Leg over Leg’s pioneering modernist roots, elaborates the nature of al-Shidyāq’s modernism, and argues that it is still rich with potential.

This chapter contextualizes Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār’s largely overlooked writings in early twentieth-century periodicals that forged the critical vocabulary for an emerging literary discipline called adabiyāt. It shows how adabiyāt’s institutionalization in the 1930s and 1940s was marked by the erasure of its semantic multiplicity, rendering it a singular and standalone concept. This erasure is the last step in the mythologization of Persian literature as a historical construct. The realignment of adabiyāt as literature entailed discussions and debates about the role of language and literature in a nationalizing society where intellectuals such as Bahār were being socialized in a new national reality. Linking these individuals and conversations were voluntary and state-funded associations or anjomans, which laid the foundation for a modern discourse of literature in late Qajar and early Pahlavi Iran. The chapter argues that if scholars, students, and admirers of Persian literature are to create more socially responsible and inclusive ways of celebrating and understanding Persian literary works, we cannot afford to romanticize its pasts.

The global turn in Modernist Studies has emphasized the connection between literary modernism’s unique aesthetic practices and the politics of a given modernity. In the Turkish experience of modernity, the question of how to differentiate the identity of the new nation from its predecessor the Ottoman Empire was at the heart of debates about the role of literature and aesthetics. Even though the empire had formally ended with the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, legacies of imperialism fundamentally shaped debates over how literature of the new nation should be written. In this chapter, Kaitlin Staudt suggests that the relationship between modernist literary aesthetics and the literary representation of imperialism in the early Turkish Republic was rooted in global imperial power relations.

In this chapter, the editors of the volume Turkish Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury 2021) work through the entanglements between modernization and modernism in Turkey in the fashion of a broad survey and present a framework to understand the various modernisms in the literary sphere as they convey the country’s unique dynamics. Alkan and Günay-Erkol discuss how various elements of modernism are utilized, appropriated, and transformed in the context of Turkey and examine how the term “modernist” gains different meanings in relation to modernity’s varying but constant powerful drive toward a radical break from the past. To this end, they first establish the essential premise of Ottoman Turkish modernization. They investigate the historical and cultural circumstances of literary production and the responses and reactions to modernity during this period. The chapter thus elaborates on how “modernist” works differ from the more broadly conceived “modern” ones in order to delineate a space for modernism as a literary mode in Turkey.

This chapter reads the work of experimental poets who emerged in the 1950s in Turkey. The loose poetic movement known as İkinci Yeni (the Second New) was radical in the context of mid-century Turkish letters for its dense language, unusual images, and intentional flouting of conventional grammatical and syntactical rules. When this new style of poetry appeared around 1956, İkinci Yeni gave rise to a vigorous and sometimes vicious debate between its defenders and detractors. In hindsight, the central locus of this conflict can be seen as positions taken for and against aesthetic autonomy, the sine qua non of literary modernism. In order to challenge Eurocentric narratives of modernism that take concepts such as aesthetic autonomy for granted in terms of when and how they appeared, this chapter attends to the ways local histories of capitalist modernization and political developments help shape the appearance of modernist literature in geographies like the Middle East.

This chapter turns to the Persianate tazkirah tradition to show how the shared discourse of literary modernization, with its inherent nationalism and Victorian-influenced puritanism, led modernizers to work together to remake their shared Persianate heritage and create chaste, heteronormative, nationally bounded literary histories. These literary histories, produced as they most often were for modernizing educational institutions, likely not only reflected changing conventions but also played a pedagogical role in spreading them. The generations who began to receive a modern education grew up writing poetry differently under such influences. In this way, the modernizing conventions that were first developed or deployed by literary historians impacted other genres of Persianate literature.

This chapter takes up Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā’s first published novel, Ṣurākh fī layl ṭawīl (Cry in a Long Night, 1955), arguing that it integrates modernist elements and themes into Arabic prose. Jabrā’s prose experiments derived from a literary-intellectual posture that he fully articulated in his 1958 essay al-Ḥurriyyah wa-l-ṭūfān (Freedom and the Flood). This posture, which Jabrā framed through the term al-qalaq (anxiety), was the basis of his adamant rejection of iltizām (political/social commitment) in literature. Jabrā’s experiences as a student in the UK and Harvard, his embrace of literary formalism modeled after New Criticism, and his investment in the project of cultural renewal (tajdīd) in Arabic art and literature, guided his approach to translating modernist form into Arabic. The chapter argues that Jabrā’s adaptation of the late modernist discourse of aesthetic autonomy into Arabic, which he articulated through the language of individual freedom, was positioned against discourses of commitment in an Arab intellectual tradition that viewed the relationship of aesthetics to politics as irrevocably tied to the questions of class and colonialism.

In conversation with recent scholarship which has revised the relevance of the Islamicate adab culture for Middle Eastern modernities, this chapter revisits the history of modern literature in the late Ottoman Empire. Conventionally, Ottoman/Turkish literary modernity is placed within the framework of Tanzimat (reorganization) which refers to a process of state-led politico-economic structural reforms across the empire. As in other kindred political–cultural reawakening periods overshadowed by Eurocentric comparative methodology, modern Ottoman/Turkish literature has largely been characterized as a set of anti-Islamicate gestures whereby the shared Perso-Ottoman literary culture was heavily criticized and rejected. In an attempt to counter this narrative, this chapter advances adab, Sufi poetics, and hermeneutics in particular, as the conceptual infrastructure of Ottoman literary modernity. After establishing how modern Ottoman/Turkish literature embodies hermeneutical practices associated with Sufi poetics, the chapter situates Ottoman literary modernity within an ethical–aesthetical tradition and calls for understanding modernity from the perspective of literary ethics.

In this chapter, Shir Alon suggests a framework to account for global modernist aesthetics that forgoes a diffusionist model of “traveling forms,” yet still acknowledges European literature’s inevitably hegemonic and influential position on the sphere of literary production. Looking at debates about modernity and literary form taking place in Hebrew and Arabic letters, she extracts a theoretical framework that traces the emergence of modernist prose forms to the lived experience of modernity, an experience that often fails to align with modernity’s promises. Recognizing modernity as singular, happening everywhere simultaneously but experienced differently and unevenly, the chapter undoes the “Europe first” diffusionist model of modernist aesthetic, while still recognizing the outsized effect of Europe’s hegemonic position as the rest of the world’s designated future. Modernism is not simply the outcome of European literature’s influence, but a project that emerges in numerous sites within the modern world system.

This chapter positions the period known as the Nahḍa, or the Arab renaissance, in the history of Arab modernism. It begins with Edwār al-Kharrāṭ’s 1999 study of Arab modernism, Aṣwāt al-ḥadātha. Focusing on the introduction to the book, the chapter assesses al-Kharrāṭ’s distinction between modernism (ḥadātha), which is always already deferred to the future and impossible, and “the modern sensibility, al-ḥasāsiyya al-jadīda,” which is open to historicization, investigation, and periodization. Dallal’s chapter approaches the Nahḍa through al-Kharrāṭ’s lens and traces the modern sensibilities of adab in the nineteenth century and their intimate connection to a growing discourse of civilization (tamaddun). This discourse rooted adab in its expansive traditional meaning while also opening it up to the new genres of social existence and their institutions that were appearing in the nineteenth century. Using Muḥammad al-Muwaylīḥī as an example, Dallal studies two formal characteristics that define the modern sensibilities of nineteenth-century adab: temporality and the binary hierarchies of the manifest and the latent.

The Introduction presents the book’s general argument. It describes the main objectives and central themes related to the conceptualization of not-knowing. It argues for an anthropology of that which remains nameless in anthropology, lost in the gaps between culture, structure, and process. Not-knowing refers to the difficulty of accounting for certain intense individual and collective experiences that often arise in ritual, spiritual, and religious contexts and, in many ways, defy any attempt at complete rationalization. It deals with situations in which meaning is broken, forcing anthropologists to think beyond reason. It describes how an otherness of a radical nature unfolds before the anthropologist’s gaze, both in its experiential dimension and ethnographic and argumentative construction, as well as the discipline´s blind spots. The Introduction also describes the book’s structure, the organization of each chapter, and its contribution to anthropology.

This chapter opens with a survey of the literary genres in which the human rights subject emerges: the environmental justice novel, the postcolonial novel, the neo-slavery novel, and the graphic novel. Later, it moves to study the human person as victim, and the community as they are constructed within the genres, making the argument that embodiment, dignity, and collective vulnerability define both the person and the community. In the final section, the chapter narrows the focus to one genre, the environmental justice novel, looking specifically at the works of Isabel Allende, Yaa Gyasi, and Edward P Jones.