Liberalism is globally triumphant, the dominant political ideology of the modern age. In recent decades, it increasingly has been based on the social contract tradition of John Locke and Immanuel Kant, which has been spectacularly revived by John Rawls's 1971 A Theory of Justice. Debates about the justice or injustice of the existing social order overwhelmingly use a liberal framework, typically centering on the comparative defensibility of social democratic or welfarist conceptions of liberalism versus free market, neoliberal conceptions. But there is a debate orthogonal to these familiar left-right disputes that tends to remain unacknowledged. Liberalism, I suggest, has historically been predominantly a racial liberalism, based on what has in effect been a “racial contract” among whites that denies equal personhood to people of color. White political philosophers have generally ignored this history, but only by recognizing it can we dismantle the structures of white racial privilege established by racial liberalism.

In an examination of the varied responses to the Muslim Orient by the eighteenth-century German thinker Johann Gottfried von Herder, I try to locate the multiple identities he displayed in his treatment of Turks, the Koran, Arab thought, and the doctrines of Islam. What emerges is a series of different voices, employing different registers of language: a Christian response to Islam as a rival revelation-based monotheism (but, at the same time, a more sympathetic Protestant privileging of “Muhammadanism” as a belief system preferable to “papism”); a poetic register, in which “Muhammadans” move from spiritual ignorance to a status of aesthetic desirability; a philological response to the Muslim Orient, one whose emphasis on the Middle Eastern origins of European literature would assist Herder's project of the reprovincialization of Europe; and a nationalist vocabulary, one that would see the rise of Islam as a model for the emergence of Herder's German nation but that would also, paradoxically, express a Turcophobia that demonizes the Ottomans into the other of civilization.

Wordsworth poetically realizes an ecological ethics grounded on the self's non-assimilative encounter with the otherness of nonhuman things. Engaging the etymological force of the word thing, Stoic and Spinozan philosophy, and a poetic tradition of assigning a “face” to natural things, Wordsworth arrives at a lyric apprehension of the “life of things,” a life that human beings share with other thinking and insentient, substantial and circumstantial things. Instead of anthropomorphizing things, Wordsworth “thingicizes” ethics. This aspect of Wordsworth's poems is illuminated when they are read alongside the “ethics of things” developed by Silvia Benso in philosophical dialogue with two major figures of the continental tradition: Heidegger, who conceives of things without ethics, and Levinas, who advances an ethics without things.

While Robert Frost's emphasis on ordinary themes has often been noted, his use of ordinary time bears further attention: his poems show how the repetitive pattern of daily living can be a creative possibility rather than an enervating necessity. His everyday verse suggests revised definitions of lyric temporality as well as new reconciliations of the dualistic oppositions structuring accounts of modernist and Americanist literature. In Frost, human repetition allows a willful independence endorsed by the natural world. The generally neglected poem “In the Home Stretch” demonstrates his most beneficent version of ordinary living, showing how retrospection and conversation are crucial elements of its practice and how marriage can promote these habits. Frost provides a contrasting, failed version of everyday practice in “Home Burial” and a comparable sense of repetitive possibility in “Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same.”

Engaging contemporaneous ideas about how environmental factors could alter the surface of the human body, Samson Occom and Phillis Wheatley use language emphasizing the ostensible malleability of physical characteristics—what I call a symbolics of metamorphosis—to depict the formation of racial identities. For Occom, the beliefs his Anglo- and Native American contemporaries held about the status of the “red” Indian enable him to challenge colonial society's contradictory Christian epistemology in his 1772 A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian. In her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Wheatley fuses ancient mythological beliefs and natural-historical axioms about the production of poetic genius and dark skin to characterize the black poet as an inevitable outcome rather than an anomalous exception. Drawing on the late-eighteenth-century notion of transformable race, this essay posits a historically specific model of critical race theory for interpreting early American literatures.

Mikhail Bakhtin described a novelistic world bound to the reader's point of view and perception of reality. Albert Einstein's theory of relativity justified Bakhtin's elevation of the reader to a central position in his theory of the novel. This essay examines Bakhtin's engagement with Einsteinian relativity in the context of two of his most influential contributions to critical discourse—polyphony and the chronotope. Originating in the 1920s, Bakhtin's notion of polyphony was initially an expression of his Kantian mind-set. When Bakhtin reworked his formulation of polyphony in 1963 (having already broached the topic of literary spaciotemporality with the chronotope), Einstein had replaced Kant as Bakhtin's guiding intellectual paradigm. In advocating a relativistic model to explicate the literary world, Bakhtin aligned centuries of novelistic tradition with a distinctly modern worldview. His use of the epistemological possibilities inaugurated by twentieth-century physics allowed him to interpret centuries-old texts with an insightfulness available only to a post-Einsteinian reader.

Andrey Bely's novel Petersburg (one of the high points of Russian literary modernism and a rough analogue to James Joyce's Ulysses) repeatedly claims that parent and child, being of the same flesh and blood, share an ambivalent identity. At the same time, because the novel opens by invoking a major character's genealogical relation to Adam, the book implies that this kin identity is universal and can be applied to the entire human race. This essay analyzes the role of kinship metaphor in Petersburg, demonstrating that tropes of parent-child identity facilitate the novel's dizzying metaphoric conflation, that they form a kind of metafictional mirror in which the novel probes its own nature as a work of the imagination, and that Bely's theory and practice of metaphor touch on broader philosophical issues of figure and fictionality.

This essay explores the limits of the liberal critique of racism by focusing on the dynamic interaction among race, space, and modes of production. My context is a national-historical moment when the confluence of these themes was being debated with intensity: Mexico's 1880s project of colonization (colonización). Enabling my analysis is a critical reading—the first ever, to my knowledge—of a daring argument set forth by an advocate of the colonization policy, the newspaper editor and political activist Luis Alva. The idea is that if liberalism, whether neo or classical, relates to space, it does so through its tenacious drive to make space productive in the capitalist sense, enlisting the state (the government and its armed forces) in this task. People, of course, usually get in the way. In the modern world, this conflict often articulates to processes of racialization. Alva deals with this in a provocative, forward-looking, and ultimately unsustainable way.

In Prague a debate is taking place over whether an aquarium ought to be built on the site that once housed the largest monument to Stalin. The site is difficult to contend with, not only because it is a physical reminder of the atrocities committed during the Communist rule but also because of the monument's bizarre history, one plagued by absurd events. The monument's history is preserved in obscure historical and fictional narratives. I explore these narratives in terms of monumentality, foreign imposition, socialist-realist aesthetics, power, and humor. I concentrate on the dual function the absurd served in the history of the statue. Reliance on humor, while enabling the Czechs to undercut the monumentality of this emblem of the imposition of foreign power, also fostered a forgetting of the statue's history and political significance. Thus, the Czechs' propensity for the absurd, even if temporarily freeing, ultimately undermines the nation's understanding of its past.

The critical ingredient of American democracy—the consent of the governed—is placed under the microscope in Ishmael Reed's The Freelance Pallbearers and his related works. Reed's portrait of the consent of the governed—and of the ways in which it is undermined—allows us to discern the structure of what medical and legal thinkers call informed consent: agreement that is the fruit of neither force, fraud, nor incapacity. Reed's portrayal of battles for and against consent, in fact, allows us to theorize that a key distinction between more and less democratic societies is the sort of “consent horizon” within which their citizens operate.

About one hundred inmates are seated in the prison gym, waiting for the performance of king lear to begin. Then Jamal, as Edmund, steps out from behind the makeshift set and paces across the stage, his sharply trimmed goatee pointing outward like an accusing finger, his burning gaze fixed on the audience. He raps: “Secret fears are brought to life on stage. / My life is in a rage, and to write my life / One page is not enough. / But if I had one mike I might be able to / Escape this cage … bring Shakespeare to life through my high beams.” Appropriating Cordelia's words, he declares that “I am not the first who have incurred the worst / But I have concurred with those who oppose my life's worth. …” He continues:

They label me violent because I stay bottled up and silent
And although my life is like a raging sea
My heart sings … no life is quiet.
Stop complaining, you say, but I can't because
I'm trapped on the stage of life's lies.
And I ask you
Why brand they us with base? With baseness?
Bastardy? Base? Base?

The seminal novels of the Philippines, José Rizal's Noli me tangere (1887) and El filibusterismo (1891), are written in Spanish, a language that began evaporating in the archipelago when the United States defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and imposed English as a lingua franca. Where does a foundational author like Rizal fit in a discussion of globalized literatures when the Philippines are commonly framed as a historical and cultural hybrid neither quite Asian nor quite Western? In Rizal's El filibusterismo, the Philippines are an inchoate national project imagined not in Asia but amid complex allusive dynamics that emanate from the Americas. Rizal and his novel, like the Philippine nation they inspired, appear in global and postcolonial frameworks as both Asian and American in that epistemes Eastern and Western, subaltern and hegemonic, interact in a ceaseless flow that resists easy categorization.

Improvisation was long the apex of the arts of eloquence, yet modern scholars ignore its importance as a rhetorical and literary genre, thereby severing a long-enduring connection between rhetorical and literary history. This essay reads Plato's Menexenus to formulate a theory of improvisational rhetoric around the cultural position of Aspasia, a foreign woman renowned for eloquence in Periclean Athens. It then places this construction of improvisation alongside Germaine de Staël's early-nineteenth-century novel Corinne to demonstrate the endurance and evolution of improvisational rhetoric. Doing so not only illustrates the long-standing—and long-neglected—influence of improvisation on both rhetorical theory and literary production but also challenges present-day disciplinary prejudice by revealing the permeable boundary between imaginative works and those that provide rhetorical instruction.