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

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.” —Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression”

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...

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.” 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 his lynching victim "Sambo,” Joyce marks the lynching as a theatrical phenomenon, spectacularly American. Joyce draws a link between blackface minstrelsy and anti-black mob violence as parallel art forms, as two American cultural performances that get similarly staged, transmitted, and consumed globally. In that sense, Joyce thematizes the ways that non-American global writers leverage and export narratives of American racial violence in order to mark themselves as modern, cosmopolitan actors, situating themselves within a global discursive network by commentating on spectacular American racism. Joyce performs modernness, in part, by engaging with American cultural iconography, and, in particular, by revising upon American conceptualizations of race. Though, late in his career, Joyce claimed to know "nothing of” the United States, Joyce’s modern aesthetic was at times informed by his own imaginings of American life, which in turn borrowed from popular transatlantic approximations of American culture generally and of black life specifically. The characters in Ulysses, for example, walk past advertisements for American-style minstrel performances at Queen’s Theatre, perform minstrelized stump speeches dedicated to "Mr President,” twist their hair into "golliwog curls,” read graphic newspaper articles about American lynchings, parody American evangelical preaching styles, embrace American slang like "bully,” fetishize the "negress” as a devilish sexual curiosity, sing American renditions of English songs, idolize the Rockefellers, and memorialize those Irish immigrants who have "smuggled off to America,” that "greater Ireland beyond the Sea” (Joyce, Ulysses, 183, 414, 290, 269, 159, 301, 591, 70, 270, 267). Though Joyce worked to distance himself from the United States, he leveraged an intimate fascination with the artifacts of American popular culture as one source text for constructing his own globalized grammar of the modern. Joyce used engagements with and references to American culture as one strategy for signaling his access to global modernity. What’s more, Joyce’s chosen conceptualization of "American” modern culture is filtered partially through spectacular, racialist performances of blackness. His early career correspondences with American literary peers like Ezra Pound demonstrate that Joyce long wielded a crystallized understanding of how a so-called "n—” spoke and behaved, based upon American imaginings of black Southern servility. In this sense, Joyce’s configurations of American modernity depend upon and are rooted through—imported and approximated—conceptualizations of the black body. Ultimately, like Joyce’s other representations of the Sambo in Ulysses, the spectacle of lynching functions as an American art form that can be harnessed, disengaged from, and revised upon for creative potential.

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...

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.” Within modernist studies, a film-centered formalism has defined many if not most approaches to charting cinema’s influence. Because film and text have such intriguing affinities—they represent through inscription and are experienced syntagmatically—the temptation is to (merely) conceive both as forms of writing, each with respective “techniques” that the other might imitate, annotate, or disavow. Colin MacCabe’s claim that “it is impossible to imagine the form of either Ulysses or The Waste Land without the developments of film editing” is exemplary of this tendency, but newer, more nuanced incarnations proliferate. Against film’s easily fetishized materiality and imitable techniques, movie going is harder to hold onto. It is modal rather than textual, performed rather than inscribed. In deploying moviegoing as a keyword, my intention is to foreground cinema’s peculiar sociality while moderating scholars’ over-reliance on medium specificity, turning from the hypostases of film form to the variegated practices of attendance. As streaming services proliferate, we can more clearly recognize moviegoing as a specific feature of cinema’s cultural and aesthetic history, rather than its only or purest form. Twenty-first-century viewing habits—at home, in our beds, on our laptops—expose moviegoing’s “givenness” to be anything but. Instead of the axiomatic, invisible, essentially unremarkable means through which cinema is/was accessed, moviegoing is better understood as a historically specific, expressive, and altogether strange modality through which cinema is/was performed. Moviegoing requires and produces a constitutive tension between individual and collective experience, promising both solitude and congregation, absorption within assembly. A moviegoing audience literalizes Michael Warner’s claim that a public “unites strangers through participation alone, at least in theory.” Viewers are gathered in temporary, anonymous, but profound intimacy.