This essay argues that there remains a far way to go before the translingual complexities of contemporary francophone poetry are exhausted. It introduces a new, different constellation of international poets, essayists, and translators to bear on the question of language choice as a means of creative expression. Building on the debates over franco-Arabic textual bilingualism that began in the 1980s, it presents close readings of translations by Salah Stétié and of original poetic compositions by Ryoko Sekiguchi. Two translational moments that foil, in french script, a deeper Arabic intertext show how literature and criticism work in multilingual situations, as they transform literary language through the aspiration of a single phonemic consonant—f.

A long-standing misreading of Jane Eyre is that Rochester's wife, Bertha Mason, is locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall. In fact, she resides on the third floor. This mistake has implications for readings of the novel and for recent critical methodologies such as “surface,” “denotative,” and “dialectical” reading strategies. Jane Eyre associates the spaces of Thornfield with psychological registers that are in turn associated with types of meaning making. This essay delineates these registers by mapping them onto the Lacanian schema of imaginary, symbolic, and real orders, thus drawing out the novel's engagement with a nascent nineteenth-century depth psychology while noting how the novel itself militates against so-called surface reading.

The popularization of the digital humanities and the return to formalism are overdetermined by the perceived crises in the humanities. On the one hand, the new formalism harks back to a professionalizing strategy begun by the New Critics with John Crowe Ransom's “Criticism, Inc.,” drawing strength from close reading's original polemic against industrialism. On the other hand, the digital humanities reimagine professional labor in ways that seemingly approximate postindustrial norms. These contradictory but inextricably related visions of professional futures restage a conflict between literature and data, reading and making, that has been misrecognized as a conflict between literature and history. Approaching these tensions by way of historicist critique can illuminate the extent to which the debate between literature and data will define critical practice in the twenty-first century.

Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904), an early collection of stories for children by Charles Alexander Eastman, a Dako$$ta author, was largely viewed by his critical contemporaries as a politically innocuous analogue to Kipling's Jungle Book Stories. Through consideration of the Dako$$ta oral-historical genre of hituᒋkaᒋkaᒋpi (“long ago stories”) and of Dako$$ta peoplehood more broadly, this article proposes an alternative view of Eastman as a resistance writer who cited a long-circulating Dako$$ta kinship philosophy to criticize the enduring conditions of United States settler colonialism—a criticism that would become more pointed in his later, better-known autobiography, From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1915). In viewing Eastman's animal tales as opposed to United States colonialism, we may see more clearly his innovative translations of Dako$$ta politics into narratives that both appealed to and challenged United States settler society. These challenges were made in relation to Dako$$ta conceptions of peoplehood, power, and gift.

We assembled this cluster of essays to bring to the diverse audience of pmla some of the insights, methodologies, and models for rethinking narrative, public engagement, and environmentality that the ecological digital humanities (EcoDH) offer. We are founding members of the new MLA forum TC Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities, a collective whose existence and vigor derive from the community that social media (at their best) foster. With its syllabus exchange and participant-directed conversations, the forum's MLA Commons site owes much to the digital humanities principles of outreach, access, and inclusion. Although this electronic space is a work in progress, MLA members are using it to share pedagogical materials and research and to conduct lively discussions that push beyond the comfort zones of time period and disciplinary training. Teaching and scholarship have also been greatly enhanced by interdisciplinary networks that bridge unnecessary divides between the academy, activists, and a capaciously imagined public. Yet from the start we knew that we could not hope to be comprehensive in what we offer here. Vast and flourishing, the ecological digital humanities originate in work that spans decades. In their instantiations and concerns, they are also radically new, and the summoning of these essays marks an early attempt to establish a “futural archive,” to use a term of one of our contributors. We present in what follows snapshots of the approach's energy and emphases, a glimpse of achievements as well as intimations of possible futures. We bring together work by academics early in their careers with projects by foundational practitioners, scholars who have caused the ecological digital humanities to thrive.

This essay explores how Edwin Arnold's epic poem The Light of Asia (1879) popularized a formal analogy between Buddhism and Christianity. The poem was based on a series of missionary texts that had reshaped the Buddha's career into a close approximation of Jesus's in order to frame Buddhism as a fit object of Protestant conversion. Early anglophone readers in Sri Lanka, however, took it as evidence of Buddhism's equal stature and thus helped make The Light of Asia an international best seller and a touchstone for popular Buddhist nationalisms in the twentieth century. In this way Arnold's poem allows us to develop a more complex sense both of how literary forms globalize—how a literary construct can take on global purchase precisely because readers disagree over its meaning—and of the powerful role that specific literary media play in influencing these different interpretations.

This essay compares Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus (1669) and Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy (1985), approaching them as picaresque war novels that tell the story of a vernacular language becoming literary through brutal war. Despite differences of language, nation, and time, the novels of Grimmelshausen and Saro-Wiwa share a structural similarity traceable to their respective postwar contexts. These novels rewrite the expected relation between war and language. Instead of privileging the damage done to speech, they authorize a spoken language through the medium of a highly mobile rogue protagonist. Grimmelshausen and Saro-Wiwa contend with the question of whether a language, lacking the official status guaranteed by a sovereign state, is strong enough to constitute and represent a territory divided by civil war. In their works, war tears apart a territory and lays the foundation for its autonomous postwar culture all at once.

“World literature” will always fail because there is no such thing as the world. I draw on speculative realism to elaborate how all formations of a single world literature stem from problematic world concepts (particularly “the globe”) that write certain literary traditions out of the world. Using Gayatri Spivak's concept of the planetary, I move toward a mode of reading that attends to how individual texts regionalize the planet vis-à-vis their own centers of production. Instead of imagining a single world sectioned into center and periphery, this method recognizes that, far from dwelling on their own marginalization within the global economy, all localities (and literatures) posit themselves as center and regionalize outward from this center. Reading for regionalization pluralizes the possibilities of literary worlding. This practice requires us to understand and to honor the formal character of introversion, which I theorize through the case of the Swahili novel.

Never having known Assia Djebar, i can only speak of the effect her writing has had on me, above all one of her first works, Les enfants du nouveau monde (Children of the New World), created as Algerian independence became a reality, inaugurating a postcolonial nation full of promise and contradiction. In this novel Djebar wrote of Algeria at a moment, 1961-62, when it was on the threshold of its becoming, the very moment of the invention of Algeria, when the coming laborious construction of Algeria, which continues today, was already visible. The moment when the unyielding violence of the struggle to invent this new country, nation, people, and culture might have ceased, in a site subject to a violence that had proceeded endlessly, terrifyingly, since 1954, since the massacre in Sétif in 1945, since the French invasion of 1830, since the fly-whisk incident and the blockade of Algiers in 1827. By 1961 Algeria had for centuries been defined and constructed by violence. In Les enfants du nouveau monde we encounter the trace of a moment when the participants in the Algerian revolution and war had been shaken to the core of their being by the terror of that struggle and risking of life, a moment when what Frantz Fanon called “le problème de l'homme” (374), the invention of a human being beyond the consuming circles of Eurocentric hegemony, was of the utmost urgency. A moment when Algerians were about to give form and reality to Algeria. Here Djebar wrote of this Algeria in a future perfect and perfect future of that moment, an Algeria that would no sooner be born than vanish, an Algeria that still, today, will have been.

Academic institutionalization of the environmental humanities began in the early 1990s, and since 2000 the field has grown rapidly because of infrastructural support and because of funding for curricular innovation and programming. The environmental humanities include historical, philosophical, aesthetic, religious, literary, filmic, and media studies; they are informed by the most recent research in the sciences of nature and the anthropogenic factors that contribute to increasingly extreme weather events—drought, fire, hurricanes, melting glaciers, and warming and rising oceans (see Adamson, “Humanities” 135; Nye et al. 22-28).

Based on an analysis of three literary texts about Dayaks—the indigenous peoples of Kalimantan (Borneo) in Indonesia—this essay argues that strategic submission can play an important role in indigenous peoples' attempts to obtain and maintain agency under the shadow of dominant discourse. Discussions foundational to the field of postcolonial studies have tended to focus on the importance of subversion, resistance, and counterdiscourse in liberating the oppressed subject. Taking reading cues from anthropological and sociological accounts of Dayak compliance with various constructions of Dayaks, this essay looks at how the writing of literature about Dayaks (by both non-Dayaks and Dayaks) functions as an enactment of and meditation on the application of dominant discourse to indigenous peoples and the opportunities that such discourse affords for carving out spaces of autonomy.

Through an examination of short stories from the Malaysian Chinese author Ng Kim Chew's 2001 collection From Island to Island, this essay reflects on the taxonomic functions of criteria such as language, ethnicity, and nationality, particularly as they inform contemporary discussions of Chinese, Sinophone, and Mahua (Malaysian Chinese) literature. Several of Ng's stories are set on remote islands and feature individuals who, having been forcibly separated from their original linguistic or social environment, offer a vehicle for reflecting on some of the consequences of literary taxonomies that arbitrarily prioritize one criterion (such as language or nationality) over others. Drawing on Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance, the essay proposes a taxonomic system that does not rely on a single criterion but rather attends to the dynamic interaction among a variety of criteria. The resulting model is used to interrogate the naturalized conception of the family on which Wittgenstein relies.

The ecological digital humanities evoke a method of thinking that is responsive to what jane bennett terms “the ecology of things.” Neither strictly an ecocriticism nor a pursuit solely of environmental(ist) concerns, the ecological digital humanities explore the material and philosophical interconnectedness of actants in assemblages. They attempt, digitally, to think what Timothy Morton calls “the ecological thought.”

The Cuban Revolution Generated a New Communist Paranoia in the United States. Interest in Latin America Grew Dramatically after Castro's rise to power in 1959 and was partly responsible for the explosive growth in the number of scholars specializing in hemispheric issues during the 1960s. Latin Americans, in turn, saw this phase of the Cold War as a furthering of imperial aggression by the United States. The Eisenhower administration's authoritarian diplomatic maneuvers to isolate Guatemala by accusing the country's democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz (1950-54), of being a communist and by pressuring members of the Organization of American States to do likewise had already alarmed intellectuals and artists in Latin America five years before. On 17 June 1954, Carlos Castillo Armas and a band of a few hundred mercenaries invaded the country from Honduras with logistical support from the Central Intelligence Agency in an operation code-named PBSUCCESS, authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953. By 1 July 1954 the so-called Movement of National Liberation had taken over Guatemala. Angela Fillingim's research evidences how the United States officially viewed Guatemala as “Pre-Western,” according to “pre-established criteria,” because the Latin American country had failed to eliminate its indigenous population (5-6). Implicitly, the model was that of the nineteenth-century American West. As a solution, the State Department proposed “finishing the Conquest.”

The death of assia djebar on 7 february 2015 marks the end of an era in literary and world history. The last survivor of the generation of Algerian writers who took up the pen in the mid-1950s as their country embarked on its historic struggle for independence from France, Djebar continued writing long after the deaths of Mouloud Feraoun (1962), Kateb Yacine (1989), Mouloud Mammeri (1989), and Mohammed Dib (2003). With her death, the age of decolonization and African revolution as it resonated in literature seems truly to have come to a close. Djebar was the only woman among the Algerian literary pioneers, and her work, which includes novels, essays, documentary films, and plays, explores, above all, the experience of Algerian women. Challenging official nationalism, these counternarratives tell stories about women's roles in war in which the political doesn't efface the personal and victory doesn't signal the end of suffering or the fading of loss. This oppositional stance was carried even into the rituals observed in the aftermath of her death. Official services conducted at the airport and the Palais de la Culture in Algiers were shadowed and indeed overshadowed by less-formal ceremonies in which family, friends, and members of Algerian women's movements recited poetry and chanted Berber songs.