This essay argues that the 1957 Black-cast revival of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot stages an Africana absurd sensibility that precedes and supersedes European philosophies of absurdism. While the Continental absurd developed as a repudiation of Western reason and aspired to a universalizing assessment of the human condition, the Africana absurd is situated in the historical formation of racial slavery and colonialism. More specifically, the Africana absurd is a response to the formal meaninglessness and incoherencies of Western racial logic. Locating it within the existential and historical situation of Black theater in the Jim Crow era and attending to theatrical elements such as casting, stage props, and choreography, this essay shows how the production recasts Beckett's absurdism, metatheatricality, and antihumanism to present, rather than represent, the felt absurdity of racial modernity.

This essay proposes a new way of thinking about Dickens's “little” characters in The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend, referencing Melanie Klein's “play-technique.” Klein was the first to theorize the anxious aggressive child and to posit a complex object relating in which the damage and repair of toys mediated and modulated the unmanageability of infantile emotion. Dickensian characterization, often criticized as object-like and lacking complex interiority, can be understood to intuit the developmental dynamics that Klein would locate in interactions between the child and the thing. Dickens's increasingly interiorized protagonists are surrounded and mirrored by toylike figures that problematize the thesis of novelistic maturation, proving as essential to the depiction of a complex psychology as internal monologue or achieved Bildung.

This essay examines the shadowy brokerage of literary and anthropological value during the era of decolonization and its connection to the institutionalizing of African literature. Drawing on original archival research, it recovers the conversation between the Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek's major long poem Song of Lawino and the Oxford Library of African Literature, a series of oral-literature anthologies edited by Okot's and Talal Asad's advisers at the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology. Instead of reciprocating the series's temporal and hierarchical assumptions, which appropriate late modernist literary criticism's nostalgic veneration of the British past, Song of Lawino reconfigures the protocols for the textual production of oral poetry by revising social anthropology's theories of time and matter. If accounts of the departmentalization of African literature portray it as a transfer of colonial paradigms to postcolonial contexts, this interfield account of the making of Song of Lawino calls for an alternative history.

The Secret Agent and Lolita are among the most influential novels of the last century. Both describe European lodgers who insinuate themselves into nuclear families that serve as symbolic cocoons inside the most powerful nation-states on earth in 1907 and 1955, respectively. These two upmarket infiltration novels track an uneasy movement into the heart of Anglo-American darkness. Taken together, they also describe the arc of cultural capital traveling across the Atlantic. They orbit a myth of the stable West that can be neither disavowed nor dismantled. What can we learn now from the historical relation between these novels, set within the dilapidated metanarratives of Pax Britannica and the American Century? Is there a post-Western future for anglophone literary studies? To address those questions, this essay combines close formal analysis of Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov with a test run of current world systems and longue durée reading methods.

This essay examines Ezra Pound's behind-the-scenes control of the little review Four Pages, which ran for fifteen issues from 1948 to 1951. After his return to the United States in 1945 to face charges of treason, Pound was declared mentally incompetent and institutionalized in a mental hospital in the nation's capital. With his publishers attempting to rehabilitate Pound's public standing by spotlighting his purely “literary” efforts, Pound had to resort to anonymous publication to continue to have a say on contemporary matters. This essay shows how Pound essentially created and edited a little review to have a venue that pushed his social and political ideas at a time when doing so openly was problematic for legal and political reasons. The use of anonymity as a writer and editor was part of the wider “literary camouflage” that Four Pages engaged in to advance Pound's wider cultural and political agenda.

This essay argues for an energy literary criticism that centers the problem of the energy epoch as the problem of the color line. It does so by reading a set of novels—Helena María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011) and The Underground Railroad (2016)—as fossil fuel fictions that illuminate the conjuncture of energy and racial capitalism. These works unearth the racialized world making of extractive energy regimes by articulating energy's social production of race across the colonial histories and geographies of the Anthropocene. The entanglement of racialized bodies and hydrocarbon matter across biological, historical, and geological time scales in these novels formalizes what Kathryn Yusoff calls the “geologies of race.” Excavating the racial infrastructures scaffolding the Anthropocene's power grids, Viramontes's and Whitehead's georacial imaginations envision decolonial and abolitionist energy futures for Brown and Black lives.

As the literature of Creole societies severed ties with colonial literary models, a new literature conceptualized through scholarly and literary conversations on creolization emerged. In a zeal to amplify Creole solidarity against colonial dominance, however, these conversations unfortunately erased the internal hierarchies and linguistic unevenness among the formerly colonized, uniting them all under the banner of the Creole language. The aesthetics of the literature of creolization is consequently read through the lens of a strict dichotomy opposing the colonized, Creole, and orality to the hegemony of the colonizer, the colonizing language, and writing. Reading the Mauritian novelist Ananda Devi's Pagli (2001) in depth, I reveal a novel that goes against this trend and bears witness, through its very textuality, to the complexity of racial and linguistic stratifications in Creole societies, without flattening them into dichotomies. In this light, it constitutes a necessary theoretical intervention in the field of creolization aesthetics.

This essay identifies “selling out” as an enduring yet evolving concern in anglophone literary history, from the late nineteenth century's divided literary field to the “program era” to the increasingly global circuits of contemporary literary commerce. It begins with Henry James, showing how his canonical statements on modern narrative form emerged from commercial negotiations—an economic prehistory of “craft.” Selling out becomes a salient concern as intellectuals come to see commercial success as antithetical to modern art. This cultural anxiety changes, however, once creative writing programs begin systematically reconciling craft and commerce. Turning to Nam Le's celebrated short story collection The Boat, the second section shows how selling out came to entail a fear that minority writers might betray group solidarity through reductive or essentialist portrayals of identity. Finally, the essay's third section closes by situating Le within a global market for postcolonial fiction and its attendant concerns over commodifying exoticism.

Alexandre Dumas père left behind few explicit reflections on race and slavery in the modern world, but he was not silent on these subjects. Before the tireless deeds of the musketeers, or the vengeful fantasies of the Count of Monte-Cristo, there was Georges, an 1843 novel of race and slave rebellion set on the island of Mauritius. This essay explores questions of homecoming, homelessness, and recognition in the novel. It argues that the text incorporates a series of references to the Homeric Odyssey and that these come to illuminate the complexities of a problem faced by metropolitan French novelists of the nineteenth century: What manner of plot might grasp, or fail to grasp, the interlocking injustices of racism and slavery? After all, Georges does not conclude with homecoming and recognition, as the model of the Odyssey might imply, but with homelessness.

The birth of the modern refugee is nearly always told as a story of territory, in which the changing character of the European nation-state radicalized processes of exclusion. Yet changes to the nation-state in the twentieth century transformed not only how territory was inhabited but also how time was inhabited and experienced. The powers of national sovereignty thus operate not only through lines on maps or militarized borders but also through policing the borders of the past, present, and future. In this essay, then, I offer a broad reframing of modern refugee writing, focusing on the ways that it has emerged with and challenged national sovereignty's power over time rather than over territory. To do so, I examine a recurring figure: a refugee, real or imagined, who refuses to progress forward into citizenship, taking up a posture in time that is queer, backward, and antiteleological.

This essay makes a case for the centrality of premodern Persian literary criticism to understanding Islamic virtue ethics as a world tradition of civility. It argues that this body of criticism took the form of two distinct if overlapping interpretive postures, the charismatic-allegorical and the humanist-philological, and that these two postures assumed and furthered two forms of friendship: a vertical form of Sufi hierarchy and a horizontal form of humanist-philological tutelage. Pointing to the centrality of both kinds of friendship to the urban settings in which Islamic virtue ethics has situated itself, it then sets forth how these presupposed models of friendship conditioned literary commentary by considering representative passages from three Mughal commentaries on Sa‘dī's canonical The Rose Garden of 1258. It closes by expanding on its opening remarks on the relations between metaliterary discourse and virtue, speculating on the ethical limits of this body of Persian literary criticism in relation to the modern practice of critique.

Medieval poetic forms defy classification, and yet medievalists trade in postmedieval formalist taxonomies—sometimes without reflecting on their history. This essay takes up the case of the “bob and wheel,” a rhyming flourish best known from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas. This form, which has no given name or firmly set shape in the manuscripts in which it is found, was codified by the philologist Edwin Guest in 1838. This essay tracks the history of the interpretation of the bob and wheel across time, from the Middle Ages to the present day, and finds that it has been imagined as a tail, a game, and a cog in a machine. These phantasmic images have not only represented but also influenced readers’ experience of this form—reflecting and diffracting, bringing before-unseen patterns of meaning into focus and resonating with before-unheard synchronous frequencies.