If Claudia Rankine is right that “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” how do you write a poem that does justice to the ongoingness of that condition, the changing same of Black grief and death, from the Middle Passage to Black Lives Matter? [1] Rankine’s celebrated mixed-media, didactic Citizen: An American Lyric, which includes elegiac prose poems for Trayvon Martin, James Craig Anderson, and others, represents one way to meet the challenge. [2] For another Black American poet who...

By the fifth line of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem, the author has already invoked advertisements for three different products. The “ZIG-ZAG” cigarette papers, “LION NOIR” shoe polish, and “CACAO BLOOKER” hot chocolate posters she mentions—presumably glued to the walls of the “NORD-SUD” metro line she names beforehand—are united not only by their commodity status, but also by the particular kind of imagery mobilized to promote their sale. The head of the “Zig-Zag man” that appeared on posters at...

We remain part creole, part colonial, seeking many-ancestoried conclusions. Our tides flow down the river, meet a holy but not wholly receptive sea. —Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens, 1974 [1] “Well, I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone else,” Jean Rhys, shortly before her death in 1979, said to David Plante, as he relates it in Difficult Women (1983). [2] Rhys cautioned that the story would sound familiar; however, she had told him “part of it, but not all” (Plante...

© 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press If one listens closely one will note too that a word is slurred in one position in the sentence but clearly pronounced in another. This is particularly true of the pronouns. A pronoun as a subject is likely to be clearly enunciated, but slurred as an object. For example: “You better not let me ketch yuh.” [1] —Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression” When Zora Neale Hurston commented on the variations of African American dialect for her...

It was a Tuesday morning in April of 2020, and I had just seen the news of Ahmaud Arbery , the young African-American male who was shot while jogging through a suburban neighborhood in Georgia. [1] I had been preparing to join my live virtual composition class, as I had every other Tuesday since in-person classes had shuttered and moved online in March. Only today, I struggled to find the words to begin class as usual, as I watched nervously to see whether my husband would make the bend to enter...

The library cards and logbooks preserved in Sylvia Beach’s papers confirm the conventional image of Shakespeare and Company: the bookshop and lending library sat at the very heart of interwar modernism. The shop conjures images of Ernest Hemingway perusing the bookshelves and Gertrude Stein stopping by from her home a few streets away. James Joyce, George Antheil, and André Gide are among the many names we associate with the bookshop’s dazzling community. And the Shakespeare and Company records...

In September 1938, Reed Edwin Peggram, a Black American doctoral student at Harvard, moved to Paris to study decadence in nineteenth-century French literature at the Sorbonne. Soon after his arrival, he went to Shakespeare and Company and subscribed to the lending library, joining a long list of American expatriates in Paris who had made the pilgrimage to the famous bookshop on the Left Bank. In this article, I analyze the books he borrowed. Looking at other people’s bookshelves is quite an...

© 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press At one point late in Ulysses, while referencing the fictionalized account of a graphic, gruesome American lynching of a black man, a character in "Cyclops” refers to the ill-fated mob victim as a "Sambo.” [1] Sambo is a plantation-era racial term that, by the early twentieth century, had become an enduring American stage archetype, often performed in blackface, that spun entertainment from stereotypes about black Americans as provincial and lazy. By naming...

For someone who thinks a lot about photography, I have decidedly mixed feelings about being seen. In Canada, where I grew up and once again live, the state’s term for non-Indigenous racialized people like me is “visible minority.” The hypervisibility of racialization often confers a kind of invisibility, however. As a cis scholar of mixed Chinese descent, I am persistently misrecognized by other members of the institutions through which I move, mistaken for a student, staff member, a different...

Why moviegoing? Scholars assessing the imaginative contact between literature and early cinema have largely missed the moviegoer, who wanders off or risks getting lost in the dark. Image, close-up, montage, projection: these and other “technical” elements more quickly cohere, appear more self-evidently formal. As David Trotter put it in Cinema and Modernism, our understanding of literature’s relationship to cinema is all too often “committed . . . to argument by analogy.” [1] Within modernist...