The Introduction establishes the stranger as a figure, and estrangement as a method, as key paradigms for understanding postcolonial modernism in South Asia. After the powerful groundswell of decolonization, the early post-Independence moment is characterized by a sense of disillusion, indifference, disaffection, and a growing chasm between self and other. It is during this moment of self-reckoning that a generation of intellectuals became interested in existential philosophy in all of its forms. Drawing from the multivalent figure of the ajnabi (outsider, the foreigner, the refugee, and the stranger), as well as the various indigenous etiologies of estrangement, the chapter argues for a new way of understanding the “postcolonial,” beyond nation, nationalism, and national culture. For playwrights, poets, and artists in this moment, estrangement becomes a powerful aesthetic and philosophical resource; to see something “in a strange light” offers the potential for a new aesthetic vision. Via the comments of writers, artists, and critics like Sadequain and Girish Karnad, who describe the search for a new aesthetic form, and theories of modernism in the subcontinent, this chapter offers a context for reading via postcolonial literature in light of its new existential challenge and its mystical visions.

The subject of this chapter is the Byzantine church from the reconquest of Constantinople in 1261 until the fall of the Byzantine empire, with a distinct focus on the fourteenth-century hesychast controversy. Key themes addressed are the relations between the church and State, ecclesiastical reform and mysticism. Beginning with the Arsenite Schism of the late thirteenth century and the reforms of Athanasius I in the early fourteenth, most attention is paid to the dramatic upheaval in ecclesiastical life created by the hesychast controversy that began in the 1330s and continued with vigour for several decades. We summarise the nature of the controversy, highlighting the strong synthesis of ascetic and sacramental practice and theology it created. This synthesis was quickly bequeathed beyond the empire’s borders, especially among Slavic Christians, and it likewise proved resilient for Greek-speaking Christians of the Ottoman empire after the fall of Constantinople. The theology and spirituality of the late Byzantine church in this period became instrumental in shaping the ongoing practices and theology of the Orthodox church.

Women have been historically relegated to supporting other people’s lives. Is it possible to find meaning in these roles? Beauvoir examined some common strategies that women employ to overcome the sense of their own insignificance. Motherhood is one of the most common. But can a child be their mother’s project? ‘The woman in love’ indicates those women who dedicate their existences to their partner’s life and projects. ‘The mystic’ aims to lose herself in a more powerful beloved, God, while ‘the narcissist’ loves her own body. Chapter 5 examines these figures as analysed in The Second Sex, and as presented both in Beauvoir’s and another writer’s novel, and shows their enduring relevance. For instance, Beauvoir’s depiction of the narcissist has become all the more significant with the advent of social media and online identities. Similarly, Beauvoir’s exploration of women’s complicity with the world of men that oppresses them is applied to the current situation, with a focus on women in power. The chapter concludes by addressing a crucial question: is it ethical, or even possible, to renounce one’s freedom and choose submission?

This chapter explores the many ways Mexico became central in Ginsberg’s poetic evolution. Inspired by the example of his mentor, William S. Burroughs, Ginsberg visited several archaeological sites in Mexico such as Palenque, which inspired one of his most successful early poems, “Siesta in Xbalba.” Ginsberg traveled widely throughout the country and continued the mystical quest which began with his experience of “cosmic consciousness” in Harlem in 1948 as he read the poetry of William Blake. In poems such as “Paterson,” Ginsberg wrote that he “would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping/in my veins,/eyes and ears full of marijuana, /eating the god Peyote…” than endure his life in America. Ginsberg read widely in the history of culture of Mexico, and his poems as well as his journals reveal the profound effect Mexico would have on his life and work.

This chapter accounts for Emerson’s complex, and sometimes seemingly contradictory, relationship to religion and religious experience. While Emerson definitively left the Christian ministry in the early 1830s – turning his back on eight generations of his forefathers who had all become ministers – he never abandoned a profound interest in broader forms of spirituality, including those outside the pale of Christendom. If reason and faith were to be found “in the woods” (and not the church), as his inaugural debut Nature (1836) provocatively claimed, some critics have read Emerson as a secularist (or at the very least a naturalist), epitomizing larger dynamics of nineteenth-century dis- and re-enchantment. This chapter aims for a more nuanced (and multi-hued) view, arguing that Emerson believed the “spiritual laws” of the cosmos could be explained by the twinned activities of science and poetics as forms of social praxis, a communal making of beauty and truth.

Symeon’s Hymn on Divine Love offer one abbot’s answer to the question, “What do monks want?” Or rather, “What did what one abbot want his monks to want?” In his poems, Symeon enacts longing and desire. His expression of passionate love of God borrows vocabulary and tropes found also in the ancient Greek novel. Far from sublimating queer desire, Symeon seeks to activate and engage it. Unfulfilled queer longing thus becomes the essence of monastic love, as Symeon cultivates eros within the confines of expected celibacy.

The Byzantine abbot, Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022) described the monk’s union with God through images of marriage, embrace, penetration, and insemination. In illustrated the consummation of a wedding where both Christ and the monk are male, Symeon describes activities that were strictly forbidden and severely punished in the homosocial environment of the monastery. Symeon warns his audience to understand him “always spiritually” and not be “wretchedly defiled.” Yet it is not sufficient to say, “It is just a metaphor.” Like all metaphors, these homoerotic images point to things in the monks’ real world. Symeon employed same-sex desires and same-sex sexuality to structure the experience of the love of God, defining a mysticism in distinctly queer terms.

Chapter 9 considers Emerson’s first revolutionary book of 1836, Nature. Even in this first book, Goodman argues, Emerson presents a nascent epistemology of moods. The discussion then turns to the moody swings of “Nature,” from the Essays, Second Series, in which Emerson finds the natural world either bountifully present or just missed, and as taking two opposing forms: a stable finished form he calls natura naturata, and a dynamic form he calls natura naturans. At the end of the essay, Emerson abandons this main set of oppositions in a leap to a metaphysical conclusion. The Coda considers Emerson’s attraction to Michael Faraday’s idea that “we do not arrive at last at atoms, but at spherules of force.”

While it is important to trace Emerson’s main positions, one misses the living nature of his philosophy unless one also takes account of the motions, moods, and patterns within his essays, and the ways he dramatizes instability, spontaneity, and inconsistency. This emphasis is found in Goodman’s discussions of “History” in Chapter 1, “Friendship” in Chapter 3, “Nominalist and Realist” in Chapter 4, “Manners” in Chapter 6, “Experience” in Chapter 7, “Nature” in Chapter 9, and “Illusions” in Chapter 10. Chapter 2 distinguishes the sheer variety of skepticisms in Emerson’s thought, about the world and other minds, but also about mystical experiences that refuse “to be named” or are “ineffable.” It also attends to the differences between the “modern” tradition of skepticism as doubt, and skepticism as a form of life, with Emerson’s essay on Montaigne a key source for his idea of a “wise skepticism.”

Chapter 2 begins with Emerson’s responses to the ineffable character of mystical experience: one of silence and listening, the other of a profusion of terms from a multitude of cultures. Writings on mystical experience by William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein are part of the discussion. This chapter considers Emerson’s skepticism about the “external world” and “other minds” and about both freedom and fate, which form a “knot of nature.” The following section concerns skepticism as an existential condition, as when Emerson writes in “Experience”: “So it is with us, now skeptical, or without unity.” The chapter concludes by considering skepticism as a positive way of life, what Emerson calls a “wise skepticism.” This form of skepticism has roots in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds and, in a particularly important form for Emerson, in the Essays of Montaigne.

This chapter follows the trajectory of an early Cold War ideal of a pro-American Islam that could serve US foreign policy goals. It asks how and why Islamic mysticism generally, and Sufism specifically, came to be seen as the West-friendly “moderate Islam.” What role did transculturation and comparativism between Türkiye and Iran under America’s global hegemony play in forming this common perception?

This essay explores two movements that developed in reaction to naturalism and its mimetic logic of stage realism at the turn of the twentieth century. Symbolism sought to represent the unrepresentable essence of the human experience, turning to allegories, fables, and mystical images to conjure spirits from both the natural and supernatural realms. Expressionism likewise aimed at an alternative aesthetic for representing the unrepresentable but did so with an eye towards the epistemological uncertainty of knowing oneself in relation to the modern world. It featured an abstract palette of skewed lines and woodcut shadows to depict the anxious experience of unpredictability, ironically projecting movement as stasis onto an increasingly stylised mis-en-scène.

Schoenberg explored atonality principally in ten groundbreaking works composed between March 1908 and the end of 1917. The atonal works can be divided into two phases, which differently develop the expressive capacities of atonality in a wide array of vocal, orchestral, chamber and solo piano genres. In this chapter, Schoenberg’s atonal musical language is contextualized relative to his broader compositional characteristics and trajectory, and the ten works are each situated in terms of genre and thematic content, to map out Schoenberg’s exploration of atonality as an expressive soundscape.