“I want a holophrase.” The opening of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris has provided a critical entry to this difficult poem for many critics and readers, ever since Julia Briggs’s notes informed us that the concept derives from Jane Harrison’s Themis. The central hope (and lack) expressed by the speaker’s “want” is echoed by the poem’s own search for a holistic mode of expression that can articulate the flâneuse’s full sensory, emotional, and intellectual experience of the city of Paris. The fundamental...

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...

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s midcentury psychological fantasy Black Narcissus (1947) is enjoying something of a resurgence, available to be rewatched and taught more widely than ever before. For much of the 70-plus years since its release, the movie was difficult to find except as written descriptions, movie stills or poster art (fig. 1). It was a tantalizing entry in filmmaker lore that the likes of Martin Scorsese and Tilda Swinton cite as formative influences, while ordinary...

Modernist studies’ broadening engagement with the transnational has led to greater attention to mobile forms such as the little magazine. Despite difficulties (as Kate Hartke reminds us in this cluster) such as paper shortages and problems with staffing, shipping, and supply, the periodical’s ability to travel between ports separated by oceans or within cafés divided by ideological walls enabled it to give rise to an array of modernist movements, driven by writers, editors, and readers committed...

Julia de Burgos (1914–53), one of Puerto Rico’s greatest poets, haunts the American literary imagination from the borders of the modern. [1] Her ghostly presence, desperate and furious, searches for interlocutors on the bridge to Welfare Island, historically a warehouse for the poor, the criminalized and sick just east of the United Nations. Julia’s barefoot figure wandering across that bridge in her bata, just as she describes in letters to her sister Consuelo in 1953, positions her to catch...

The modernity of colonial nations has often seemed belated, but in Australia it has been especially troubled by ongoing doubts about the authenticity of the nation itself. According to Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra in Dark Side of the Dream: “Legitimacy is a raw and buried issue in the contemporary Australian consciousness for good reasons. The current system of government, law and property derives from a chain of judicial acts which leads inexorably back to the founding event itself: an act of...

© 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press 1959: The Atlantic magazine devotes its April issue to “Africa South of the Sahara.” Articles on the politics of decolonization frame a large number of contributions on art and culture. A short story by Chinua Achebe appears alongside the work of Nadine Gordimer, Tom Mboya, Léon Damas, Léopold Sédar-Senghor, Amos Tutuola, and David Diop. “The Sacrificial Egg” is Achebe’s first story published in the United States, and its timing supports the US release of...

What do images have to do with the law? A lot, as it turns out. To make sense of an image requires the viewer to imagine a form of life. To imagine a form of life is to imagine a form of law. So law owes its existence to images; they clothe its abstract existence in sensible form. Think of the picture of sovereignty in the famous frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, the hallowed federalism of the Stars and Stripes, or Justitia, the anthropomorphic figure promising blind and equitable...

The articles gathered in this cluster will, I hope, provide the necessary spark to blow open the continuum of (settler) colonialist methodologies in modernist studies today. Extending the work of scholars such as Robert Allen Warrior, Christopher Teuton, Beth Piatote, Shari Huhndorf, Scott Richard Lyons, Philip Deloria, Daniel Heath Justice, Sean Teuton, Jodi Byrd, Lisa Brooks, Jace Weaver, and others, they challenge the unthought settlement upon which modernist studies has been revolutionizing itself for decades now. Together, they constitute an ethical demand that mainstream modernist studies scholars revise how we work. As they make plain, it’s time to face up to modernity’s—and thus modernism’s—ineluctable relationship to settler coloniality.

By the time I moved to Cairo to research Forster’s years in Egypt, late in the summer of 2018, I was already familiar with his cabinet of lost artifacts and vanished statues.