At the same moment in the seventeenth century in two distant parts of the globe, two poets who did not know of each other's existence both confronted an ancient philosophical question—How does human knowledge begin?—by imaginatively reconstructing their own originary experiences. In poetry and autobiographical prose, Thomas Traherne (in England) and Mīrzā ʿAbd al-Qādir Bīdil Dihlavī (in India) describe being in the womb, birth, nursing, first thoughts. Deeply original with respect to their own contexts yet strikingly similar to each other, these accounts demand comparison. In this essay, we draw on Carlo Ginzburg's concept of “conjunctive anomalies,” Bruce Lincoln's “weak” comparison, and Roland Greene's “obversive poetics,” among other frameworks, to reveal the overlooked early modern world of Avicennan thought. By collaboratively comparing traditions that do not fully belong to either of us, we attempt to dislodge the siloed ways of thinking that have come to structure the study of early modern literatures.

The ability to translate English poetry into ancient Greek and Latin sat at the pinnacle of a Victorian classical education, but we rarely read the resulting Greek and Latin poetry as serious literature. Yet this corpus documents an important, culturally prestigious poetic practice that entrenched a narrative of cultural descent from Greece and Rome, affiliating modern British poetry with classical antecedents. Moreover, it taught generations of schoolboys (and some noteworthy schoolgirls) interpretive methods for understanding English poetry, thereby providing an arena in which the canon of English poets coalesced before the institutionalization of English literature in universities. I re-create the interpretive moves and cultural affiliations enacted through verse composition in the Victorian period, and I analyze particular verse compositions that shed new light on the classicizing context informing contemporary poetic creation.

This essay examines theater's role in recording public history, positing a performance-sensitive approach to historiography against the singularity of both monuments and canons. The recent removal of monuments has drawn renewed attention to the problem of singular public histories. I argue for a polyvocal, repertory model of public history as theorized through the collectively written 2016 play The Fall, which records the events of the 2015–16 student protests in South Africa. The essay begins by contextualizing the play in the longer history of workshop theater and educational inequality in South Africa before specifically examining its approach to public history. Such performance-sensitive historiography enacts anticolonial epistemologies by replacing the singular representation of monumentalism with copresence amid contested histories.

While completing his national service from 1951 to 1952, John le Carré served as an intelligence corps officer whose duties included the interrogation of refugees; as a member of MI5 and MI6 between 1958 and 1963, he interrogated defectors from Soviet bloc countries to test their sincerity or duplicity. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley's People, The Secret Pilgrim, The Mission Song, and le Carré's other novels, interrogation scenes contribute to the total soundworld of the audible state. As a way to gather information through extorted speech, interrogation occurs in extraterritorial nonplaces or undisclosed, deniable locations. Drawing on historical documents, this essay positions interrogation in terms of torture, human rights, and the capacity of the state to inflict harm or to extend protection to individuals under its authority. In le Carré's novels, characters not only listen like states—comprehensively, omnisciently—but also begin to think like states.

Besides the neologism négritude, the term verrition, a hapax legomenon and the final word of Aimé Césaire's celebrated long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939–56), is perhaps the most contested and ambiguous signifier in the poet's corpus. This essay reconsiders the much-debated question of verrition and its poiesis. Contra a long-standing tenet of Césaire criticism—that verrition was a pure neologism—and further to René Hénane (Glossaire des termes rares [2004]) and Carrie Noland (Voices of Negritude [2015]), I identify several textual antecedents to and possible sources of this supposed neologism that have implications for how we read the final stanza of the Cahier. Critical focus on Césairean neology has had a somewhat obfuscatory effect on thinking through subtler dimensions of Césaire's decolonial poetics, especially how the poet frequently reinvests and rearticulates existing terms in French, redirecting them toward antiracist and anticolonial ends.

How do we as scholars of transnational US literary studies understand W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) outside the historical and racial context of the United States? Anyone familiar with the text will agree that it primarily focuses on the unique condition of African American existence or, as Du Bois himself puts it, “the strange meaning of being black” at the turn of the last century. But to what extent is this “black” experience historically, nationally, or even racially bound? An exploration of the impact of the Chinese translation of Souls in 1959 China reveals that the fluidity of historical, national, and racial boundaries goes beyond the limits of mere cultural negotiations. Situated in the critical formation of Afro-Asian engagements during the Bandung era and Du Bois's visit to China in 1959, Souls was pivotal to China's reassertion of what it means to be “black” on the global stage of proletariat revolution.

This essay analyzes Blake Hausman's Riding the Trail of Tears to explore the complexities of rendering history visible—both viewable and knowable—in the context of settler colonial capitalism. The novel centers on a virtual reality (VR) experience called the Tsalagi Removal Exodus Point Park (TREPP), which allows tourists to experience the Cherokee Removal as an educational and entertaining experience. Through the trope of VR, the novel articulates how historicizing invested in visibility risks turning Native people and knowledge into consumable objects. Instead of seeking colonial recognition by making their history visible, characters in Riding the Trail of Tears mobilize invisibility to jam the machine of settler colonialism. Their surreptitious movement leads to direct action that counters settler appropriation. The novel thus highlights the importance of Indigenous refusal and models specific strategies for enacting it.

Readers of Benito Cereno, Melville's only story about slavery, have long debated whether the Black mutineers aboard the San Dominick are, as the narrator suggests, “voiceless.” This essay begins with the self-fashioned muteness of the rebellion's leaders to offer a new linguistic genealogy of the novella, unpacking how Melville uses the cultural and legal structures of muteness to reframe Black communication. The category mute organizes the story's description, characterization, dialogue, and mode and structures the conditions of possibility for Black testimony. Such lessons were, the story's publication context reveals, more available to Melville's original readers. In showing how cultural and legal structures associated with disability served as resources for Black rights, this essay reveals how structurally intersectional analysis can resurface central aspects of a text. The cultural and legal history of Deaf culture make sites of Black communication and the possibility of Black testimony in Melville's novella legible once more.

The poet Langston Hughes was central to mid-century transnational exchanges and Cold War translation. This essay examines the poet's centrality through a new lens, presenting a case study on Czech translations of Hughes's poetry between 1950 and 1963 that draws on archival materials, especially the correspondence between Hughes and one of his Czech translators, Jiří Valja; paratexts; and analysis of translations. The essay shows how Hughes's poetry was translated into Czech against the backdrop of Cold War publishing politics and aesthetic norms, how the translations of Hughes's work operated in these contexts, and how Cold War translation emerged as a specific site of inquiry with its own challenges, contacts, and practices.

Albeit widely cited, the 1598 engraving known as Elizabeth I as Europa is something of a mystery: little to nothing is known of its authorship or of the circumstances of its production and circulation. Tracing the print's origins to one of Europe's earliest news periodicals, I argue that Elizabeth I as Europa is not about Elizabeth but about Europa—which is to say, about the construction of an early modern public that could understand itself as European. The print participated in this construction in two interrelated ways: as an intervention in Europa Regina cartography, it thematized Europe as a shared (if highly contested) space of discourse that could cut across national, linguistic, and confessional differences; as a piece of transnational reportage meant for broadscale circulation, it helped conjure up the public on which that space of discourse depended.

From 1968 to 1969 the Argentine modernist Juan Gelman invented and translated into Spanish a contemporary from the United States, named Sidney West, who wrote about small-town mid-American life. Traducciones III: Los poemas de Sidney West (Translations III: The Poems of Sidney West) is a pseudotranslation—a text disguised as a translation that in fact has no corresponding original. While most critics identify Gelman's recourse to pseudotranslation as a personal undertaking, this essay examines the experiment for the first time within the inter-American Cold War context of the 1960s, locating pseudo/translation as an in/subordinate poetic protocol particularly well equipped for intervening in the soft-power mechanisms of US cultural imperialism—in ways that are both treasonous and collaborative. This essay recovers the anti-imperialist politics of the West poems, expands conversations on translation in Gelman's poetry, and proposes pseudo/translation as a new, bifocal mode of reading for texts that forge cross-cultural contact.