Born poor, the material and ideological networks that propelled Peter Abrahams to literacy in 1930s South Africa lay bare how white liberalism, Pan-Africanism, and Marxism all overlapped as well as contradicted one another in the global 1930s. The confluences and contradictions of these currents of thought, artistic production, and political…[Read more]

This essay decodes how Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings uses the history of Jamaican music, culminating in the conflict between roots reggae and dancehall, to chart the Cold War’s conflicts over time, temporality, and futurity. A Brief History of Seven Killings points readers to a jaded, subaltern temporality encoded in a dan…[Read more]

In this article, I examine how Sissieretta Jones (frequently described as America’s first Black superstar, among other superlatives) strategically leveraged her European performance reviews in order to increase her listenership and wages in the United States. Jones toured Europe for the first (and only) time from February until November in 1895. A…[Read more]

In this article, I examine how Sissieretta Jones (frequently described as America’s first Black superstar, among other superlatives) strategically leveraged her European performance reviews in order to increase her listenership and wages in the United States. Jones toured Europe for the first (and only) time from February until November in 1895. A…[Read more]

Birds are everywhere in nineteenth-century American literature, including the work of Emily Dickinson. Women poets often referred to their poems in terms of making songs. This essay rethinks the birds in Dickinson’s letters and poems. It suggests that Dickinson’s birds, and their songs, show her awareness of business. They exist within com…[Read more]

In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me (erroneously written as Men, Women and Checks in Hughes’ article), the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the origi…[Read more]

This autoethnographic exploration, describes and reflects upon my attempt to crowdsource a modern myth on the origins of racism in America. It draws on my work in narrative studies with a special focus on stories and their role in human development. Part one is analysis of the ‘functions’ of story as both plot variables and sociological act…[Read more]

This GIF chronicles the movements of a a formerly enslaved man in New England until the publication of his first memoir in 1825. William Grimes was forced to resettle and wander through Connecticut and Rhode Island because of poverty and insecurity. He is most associated with Litchfield, CT and New Haven CT where he spent the most time and which…[Read more]

Emily Dickinson’s unique style of poetic composition is marked by ambiguity and open-endedness, leading to the genesis of a privileged space wherein reader and writer are able to meet as co-creators of meaning. As a poet, Dickinson addresses many themes in ways that are subject to countless layers of interpretation. This essay focuses p…[Read more]

Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form overturns Eurocentric genealogies and globalizing generalizations about “world literature” by examining the complex, contradictory history of naturalist fiction. Christopher Laing Hill traces the history of naturalist fiction from its emergence in France in the 1860s through its spr…[Read more]

While scholars have long considered John Keats’s Ode to Psyche a document of secularization, the poem’s precise relationship to the secular needs further attention. This essay engages with recent critiques of secularism, by Gil Anidjar and others, which challenge readings of Keats that make secularism or “toleration” a hallmark of his radical…[Read more]

When James Macpherson turned to the popular poetry of ancient Scotland, he found in it what philosophers now call folk psychology: a commonsense theory about how minds work. Yet because his poems were largely forgeries, Macpherson winds up importing more recent physiology into his portrayal of ancient, pagan materialism. As a result, the poems’ v…[Read more]