The chapter “Spectacles in Color” in Langston Hughes's first autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), envisions modernist Harlem culture as a drag performance and offers a useful rubric for understanding Hughes's The Weary Blues (1926), a lyric history of that culture whose poems characteristically cross gender, sexual, racial, and even formal lines. The Weary Blues employs a low-down, or nature-based, and down-low, or queer, aesthetic of racial and gender crossing that I term “primitive drag,” an aesthetic that ironically coincides with the stereotypes of African Americans and queers that were propagated by early-twentieth-century sexological science and degeneration theory: namely, that blacks and queers were unnatural and degenerate because they, unlike whites and heterosexuals, exhibited a lack of racial and gender differentiation. Disidentifying with those stereotypes, the primitive drag in The Weary Blues depicts queer feeling as natural and nature as queer, thus offering a productive paradox for rethinking literary histories of modernism and theories of sexuality by the rather Darwinian notion that “the nature of the universe,” as Hughes calls it, is always subject to change, or queering.

How does art cultivate moral reflexivity? Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, eyewitnesses to the atomic aftermath at Hiroshima, were the first artists to publicly display works showing the effects of nuclear irradiation on the human body. While their work has long been considered antiwar, few attempts have been made to theorize how their compositions structure an ethical response to aggression. Three interconnected zones of representation are explored: the artists' murals, Toshi's testimonials regarding the creation of the murals, and the museum in which the murals are displayed. Bringing Japanese Buddhist traditions for the depiction of suffering (etoki ‘picture explanation,‘ hell screen art) into conversation with contemporary theories of performance (Turner's concept of the “subjunctive mood,” Taylor's notion of “the repertoire”), memory (Kansteiner's “collected memory,” Auron's “pain of knowledge”), and museum studies (Crane's “distortion”), I articulate a contemporary Japanese model of nuclear criticism.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schlegel developed an influential theory of irony that anticipated some of the central concerns of post-modernity. His most vocal contemporary critic, the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, sought to demonstrate that Schlegel's theory of irony tacitly relied on certain problematic aspects of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's philosophy. While Schlegel's theory of irony has generated seemingly endless commentary in recent critical discourse, Hegel's critique of Schlegelian irony has gone neglected. This essay's primary aim is to defend Hegel's critique of Schlegel by isolating irony's underlying Fichtean epistemology. Drawing on S⊘ren Kierkegaard's The Concept of Irony in the final section of this essay, I argue that Hegel's critique of irony can motivate a dialectical hermeneutics that offers a powerful alternative both to Paul de Man's poststructuralist hermeneutics and to recent cultural-studies-oriented criticism that tends to reduce literary texts to sociohistorical epiphenomena.

The poverty of the single-digit sum in my title, I trust, raises a brow. After all, the ubiquity of those we conventionally shepherd into the enclosure of the term animals stands out as a feature of both Shakespearean material and early modern texts generally. The animal footprints in this archive result from the frequency with which early moderns encountered living and butchered animals in their daily routines. Hardly an urban, rural, or domestic scene was painted without them. For illustration, Jan van der Heyden's cityscape of Amsterdam's main public square dramatizes the civic visibility of dogs and horses (alongside the town hall and the New Church) and muddies any distinction between beasts of burden and creatures of leisure—especially beneath that vast early modern sky (see next page). In a prescient intimation of modernity, Thomas More's Utopia imagined a noncitizen, butchering class performing its labors, deemed too brutal for citizens to witness, out of sight (75). Early modern humans had more contact with more animals than most of us now do. For a species with weak ears and a terrible nose, out of sight is out of mind.

This essay employs the notions of enchantment and disenchantment to develop a theory of literature and violence across the twentieth century. War and violence were imagined either as generative, providing the symbolic core for cultural self-definition, or as entirely unredeemable, as pointless attacks on human flesh. A wide-ranging language is provided for elucidating the relation of literature to war and violence, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) is considered as an example of the key motifs traversing and defining this history. The poem demonstrates that literary modernism, for all its tendency to encode, rescript, and miscegenate, was fully and intricately engaged with the polarization between transformative and useless violence.

During the seventeenth century, the Baroque was exported wholesale to the areas of the world being colonized by Catholic Europe. It is one of the few satisfying ironies of European imperial domination worldwide that the baroque worked poorly as a colonizing instrument. Its visual and verbal forms are ample, dynamic, porous, and permeable, and in all areas colonized by Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the baroque was itself eventually colonized. In the New World, its transplants immediately began to incorporate the cultural perspectives and iconographies of the indigenous and African laborers and artisans who built and decorated Catholic structures. Cultural heresies (and heretics) often entered unnoticed or were ignored for reasons of expediency. Asian influences arrived on the Nao de China (the Manila Galleon) with artifacts from Japan, China, the Moluccas, and the Philippines, destined for Europe but portaged across New Spain, thus joining the diverse cultural streams that over time came to constitute the New World baroque. And, in time, the baroque was also transformed in Europe by New World influences: its materials (silver from Mexico and Peru, ivory from the Philippines), its motifs (fauna and flora from the Caribbean, the Orinoco, the Amazon), and its methods (artistic, doctrinal, indoctrinating).

In a 1966 lecture to the american anthropological association, Ray L. Birdwhistell presented a silent film showing families visiting elephant exhibits at zoos around the world. This film, along with the audio of Birdwhistell's lecture and an epilogue, was then released in 1969 by the East Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute with the title Microcultural Incidents in Ten Zoos. Using his theory of kinesics (roughly, the study of “body language”), a “context control method,” and “purposive” filming of families viewing elephant exhibits, Birdwhistell hoped to demonstrate that physical gestures are not universal but are rather culturally specific and only comprehensible in carefully described contexts (fig. 1). Microcultural Incidents positions the ethnographer as a detached observer dissecting scenes for his audience, translating the language of gestures with the use of a slow-motion projector he calls a “perceptiscope.” Even with his many hours of raw footage and the subsequent analysis with the perceptiscope, however, Birdwhistell's conclusions are remarkably small. Among the gems we learn, for example, are that on trips to the zoo English fathers are the keepers of food and knowledge and unselfconsciously teach their children to speak to elephants and that when the French stick their kids' hands into elephant trunks, the children look at their hands with a mixture of surprise and horror before wiping them off on their clothes. Still, for Birdwhistell kinesics held the promise of revealing hidden truths about people and cultures.

This essay contributes to recent debates in the study of the history of sexuality that have developed out of a comparison of a story from Apuleius's Golden Ass and its transformation by Boccaccio in the Decameron. Addressing questions of book history, philology, and textual transmission, the article offers another perspective on the problems of identity, temporality, and epistemology that have been at the center of these debates and proposes reorienting considerations of Michel Foucault's still-contested role in the field by drawing on the underappreciated later volumes of his landmark History of Sexuality. Instead of mining the stories of Apuleius and Boccaccio for exemplary social types or for information about the social meanings of past sex acts, this essay uses philological and paratextual materials to focalize these tales' interpretive erotics, complicate the temporal relations between them, and model a way of studying the history of sexuality that is not tied to a history of social types, identities, or acts.

Tendentious as these definitions are, they refer to the colliding conceptions from which academic activism issues. The often reductive contrast between theory and practice, thinking and doing, has been used to regulate what is admissible as campus politics as if it were apparent in advance which actions were insufficiently imbued with reflection and which worldly commitments compromised disciplinary or institutional loyalty. Suffice it to say that drawing the boundary between activity appropriately inside and outside the academy has always been anxiously freighted. The pursuit of practically engaged knowledge has been constituted in a taut exchange with the very powers it has been called on to serve—persistently but not exclusively those of the state, of industry, and of professional associations (Newfield, Ivy; Readings; Chomsky; Starr). In the lineage of the Western university, degrees of critical separation from these authorities were hard-won and were conceived of as autonomy or academic freedom (Kant). The emergent disciplinary formations of the late nineteenth century made activist claims for equality in a self-designated professional cohort under the rubric of peer review. This compact, advanced by the American Association of University Professors, ceded institutional control to administrators in exchange for noninterference with the pursuit of specialized knowledge (even if manifest as political speech), which was apportioned to those elevated to the peerage through conferral of tenure (O'Neil; Thelin).

Why the Baroque? Why now? As many have argued, the general aesthetic trend of the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries, often called postmodern, can perhaps more usefully be labeled neobaroque. Is the neobaroque turn of the twentieth century something akin to the neoclassicism of the sixteenth century, or the neo-Gothicism of the nineteenth? Or, on an even more condensed scale, is it similar to the rapid returns of previously dismissed fashion decades, as evidenced by the proliferation in the early years of this century of those beads and bellbottoms associated with flower children and the age of Aquarius?

Literary animal studies started for me when the question of animal agency arose in a survey-course discussion of a short, forgettable William Wordsworth poem titled “Nutting.” A shy undergraduate, I hesitantly volunteered an interpretation of the text as reflecting the squirrel's thoughts on the subject of seasonal change.

Today we refer to the dissolution of the classical battlefield, since combat is now waged virtually, in information networks as well as on physical terrain. The thesis of this essay is that this transformation of warfare was set in motion in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century. In the popular mythology of the Napoleonic era, world history is figured as a giant spectacle of clashing of armies whose mysteries can be discerned only by the emperor's all-seeing eye. In contrast, authors such as Rousseau, Stendhal, and Tolstoy propose that military events are best understood not through direct experience of the front lines but by reading about battles or imagining what they must be like. In the modern theater of war, the audience is enjoined to consult a medium that is no longer essentially visual.

I cannot identify what sparked my environmental awareness. The romantic in me invokes childhood with an ardently outdoor maternal grandfather, who taught me to distinguish a beech tree from a birch, to plant potatoes, and to welcome the tree frogs' spring chorus with awe and delight. More likely, the recognition arrived not from childhood pleasures or reading Henry David Thoreau but from something as quotidian and cumulative as exhaustion from years of commuting from New Hampshire to Boston for work as an adjunct, sucking exhaust fumes on Route 128.