As the shadow of the colossal american prison lengthens amid the encroaching nightfall of our twenty-first-century security state, it is pierced by a brilliant though flickering illumination: the literature created by those who have endured the terrors of America's walls and cells, with their unremitting surveillance, relentless brutality, and overpowering hopelessness. When I began teaching American prison literature back in 1975, there were 360,000 people incarcerated in the nation's jails and prisons. Today there are more than 2.4 million—almost twenty-five percent of all the prisoners in the world. During these thirty-three years, this country has constructed on average one new prison every week. Many states annually spend more on prisons than they do on higher education. More than five million Americans have been permanently disenfranchised because of felony convictions. More than seven million are under the direct control of the criminal-justice system. And the experience of these millions of prisoners and ex-prisoners becomes ever more integral to American culture, not just to the culture of the devastated neighborhoods where most prisoners grew up and to which they return but also to the culture of an entire society grown accustomed to omnipresent surveillance cameras, routine body and car searches, and police patrolling the corridors of high schools.

Álvaro Armando Vasseur's 1912 selection and translation of Walt Whitman's poetry, titled simply Walt Whitman: Poemas, was an extremely influential text for hispanophone readers—the first substantial collection of Whitman poems in Spanish. Scholars have identified Vasseur's translation as instrumental in accelerating Latin American poetry's shedding of its modernista tendencies in favor of franker, often more explicitly socially and politically engaged verse. Republished frequently throughout the period of extraordinary historical and aesthetic change bounded by 1912 and 1951, Poemas played a crucial role in keeping both Whitman and Vasseur in the public eye. Of Vasseur's prefaces to the various editions of the work, that to the sixth edition is the longest and most elaborate declaration of his sense of Whitman's importance to international letters.

This essay examines Thomas Mann's response to the “Jewish question” by focusing on a phase when he struggled to come to terms in his art with the repression of his homosexual desires and with his marriage to the daughter of assimilated Jews. Mann's attitude toward the Jews is primarily hostile in the controversial novella Wälsungenblut (The Blood of the Walsungs), in which he projects anti-Semitic stereotypes onto distorted images of his wife and new in-laws. In the novel Königliche Hoheit (Royal Highness), Mann produces a more sympathetic portrait of his wife by giving her an ethnic background closely resembling his mother's. Mann's response to the Jewish question is linked to his tendency to think in racial categories; his ambivalence toward the Jews stems from his ambivalence toward himself as an artist with repressed homosexual desires and an admixture of foreign “blood.”

As Schuyler's story hones in on market-driven formulations of identity, it speaks to fantasies and anxieties about increasing urban industrialization, racial assimilation, and the reproduction of raced bodies in the black modernist moment. Tracing the manufacture, promotion, and regulation of race in the novel, I argue that Black No More illuminates new market possibilities for the trade of racial property in commodity form during the Fordist era. In this way, Schuyler's narrative offers a complex and prescient understanding of racial capitalism in the interwar period, one that portends our contemporary negotiations with mass-mediated identity and consumer culture on a global scale.

Comics—A form once considered pure junk—Is sparking interest in literary studies. I'm as amazed as anybody else by the comics boom—despite the fact that I wrote an English department dissertation that makes the passionate case that we should not ignore this innovative narrative form. Yet if there's promoting of comics, there's also confusion about categories and terms. Those of us in literary studies may think the moves obvious: making claims in the name of popular culture or in the rich tradition of word-and-image inquiry (bringing us back to the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages). But comics presents problems we're still figuring out (the term doesn't settle comfortably into our grammar; nomenclature remains tricky and open to debate). The field hasn't yet grasped its object or properly posed its project. To explore today's comics we need to go beyond preestablished rubrics: we have to reexamine the categories of fiction, narrative, and historicity. Scholarship on comics—and specifically on what I will call graphic narrative—is gaining traction in the humanities. Comics might be defined as a hybrid word-and-image form in which two narrative tracks, one verbal and one visual, register temporality spatially. Comics moves forward in time through the space of the page, through its progressive counterpoint of presence and absence: packed panels (also called frames) alternating with gutters (empty space). Highly textured in its narrative scaffolding, comics doesn't blend the visual and the verbal—or use one simply to illustrate the other—but is rather prone to present the two nonsynchronously; a reader of comics not only fills in the gaps between panels but also works with the often disjunctive back-and-forth of reading and looking for meaning. Throughout this essay, I treat comics as a medium—not as a lowbrow genre, which is how it is usually understood. However, I will end by focusing attention on the strongest genre in the field: nonfiction comics.

The evolving political landscape of a multicultural America grown disenchanted with the mythology of the melting pot had vast repercussions for the Jewish American literary imagination. Nonetheless, critical race theory has yet to take full stock of the role of Jewish writers in the debates over canonicity, representation, and multicultural literary genealogies occurring in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. Philip Roth's The Human Stain, published in 2000, directly engages questions of literary history, race, and the position of the Jewish writer and intellectual in the canon wars. By depicting the tragedy of an African American man who passes into whiteness by passing for a Jewish professor, Roth uses the trope of passing to simultaneously critique the puritan impulse he perceives at the heart of the multicultural academy and write himself into the multicultural canon taking shape at the time.

For a little while now, i've been trying to understand the nature of captivity and confinement in four overlapping but distinct models prominent today. These four are the United States' model of mass imprisonment of surplus racial and ethnic populations as a form of socioeconomic abandonment; military imprisonment, especially in the course of permanent security wars; the European model of the detention of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees (“Fortress Europe”); and the Israeli model of occupation by encirclement and immobilization. In all these forms, or zones, of captivity, the status of the worker, the enemy, the criminal, the migrant, the resident—and thus the prisoner himself or herself—is being modified and mutated in profound ways. In each, older recognizable dynamics of race and class power persist and extend in new directions. In each, the very physicality of the prison takes at the same time more extreme and more abstract concretization as isolation unit, as camp, as safe haven, as city. I've wanted to develop a conceptual and evocative vocabulary for linking the socioeconomic dynamics of accumulation, dispossession, and political power to the dialectic of social death and social life as these meet in the ontological and epistemological status of the prisoner.

This essay looks at the American popular reception of modernist little magazines and of writers who were regularly published there, including James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. In the 1920s, book reviewers, syndicated daily book columnists who reached millions, and celebrity columnists took notice of authors or books that were considered news. Experimental modernist writing was frequently discussed, even when it had appeared in obscure little magazines. Even editorials in major newspapers debated literary trends. This national conversation about modernist writing has been largely ignored by critics, although it dramatically affected the canonization of writers in this period. Examining the popular understanding of modernism rather than the ways modernists understood popular culture reveals that there was an intimate exchange between literary modernism and mainstream culture and that modernist writers and texts were better known and, indeed, more popular than has been previously acknowledged.

At lawtey correctional institution in florida, a group of around two hundred men gather in the prison chapel. They watch raptly as the Christian-based drama group, His Majesty's Productions, performs One Thing. The stage is set to look like the prison yard, where three groups of men banter with one another. As one group begins talking, the other two freeze into tableaus. In the first exchange, the character Buster says to Jim that when he gets out, he's never coming back. “Yeah, how do you know that?” Jim asks skeptically.

The emergence of European Colonialism in the fifteenth century and the establishment of the Enlightenment project in the eighteenth century mark the rise and expansion of European modernity in the West and elsewhere. As the uncontested superpower on the world stage today, the United States is not just the custodian of empire but indeed the guardian of a European tradition of modern liberal humanism, one now mobilized to declare that the project of human freedom has been accomplished within the domestic borders of the nation-state. Our putatively color-blind moment is marked by the assertion that racial difference has given way to an abstract and universal United States community of individualism and merit—even as (or if) it demands the inexorable growth of the prison-industrial complex and ever-increasing militarization and unfreedom in global locales such as the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay (see Gilmore; Kaplan).

The norms of art-cinema narration—evident in the work of such directors as Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray, and François Truffaut—reflect noetic processes and expectations engendered by a culture of the written word. Such norms are absent from Hindi popular films, which have been historically contoured by the psychodynamics of orally based thought and by devices and motifs common to oral storytelling. By funneling art-cinema narration's norms—already meticulously (and impartially) cataloged by David Bordwell—through the prism of orality and through the orally inflected characteristics of Hindi popular films and by conjointly engaging with literary theory concerned with issues of textuality, this essay develops a novel conceptual matrix for understanding the epistemic pressures that weigh on visual storytelling as both a spectatorial and a generative act.

The rise of the religious right in societies around the world has brought back the contentious issue of religion's place in modern life. The secularization thesis is constantly invoked to explain the historical devaluation of religion's function in society (at least in the Protestant world) from normative to nominal as religion is relegated to the private space of individual belief. While the subject has engaged historians, sociologists, and religious scholars for a long time, yielding a vast and proliferating body of work (Asad; Berger; Casanova; Connolly; Taylor, Secular Age; Wilson), the field of literary studies has not witnessed a corresponding breadth of scholarship. This may be partly due to literature's self-definition as a secular vehicle for ideas whose possible religious origins were subsequently effaced as religious sensibility became absorbed into aesthetic form and imagery, especially in modernist writing. Contributing in no small measure to the perception that literature represents an outgrowth of secularism is Matthew Arnold's influential claim that literature succeeds a depleted Christianity and contains the moral values and direction once supplied by a religious ethos.

I open with two philosophical gestures that point to the two quandaries that motivate this paper. First, the (im)possibility of biography—an account of some one's life—a documenting that usually, for better or worse, takes the lives of individuals as exemplary to the community, thus setting them apart from, rather than making them part of, the community of counterparts. And second, the problem discourse itself creates: When saying what we mean, does the message always reach its “indicated address” or audience? In critical theory, discourse often seems to circumvent rather than “treat” the material at hand. In keeping with the purpose of this special issue—to speak to comparative racialization—I would like to begin with a brief challenge to this project. I find “comparative racialization” an oxymoron: a promise to render the “races”—bundled into their minoritizations—separate but equal to demonstrate the effectiveness of the happy colored folks' companionability. Good racial feeling, after all, comes in twos (think Lone Ranger and Tonto, Amos and Andy, Sonny and Cher, etc.). My critique here is not meant to be facetious or disrespectful, since I intend to follow the rigorous investigation that I am charged with: bringing pressure to bear on the “comparative” in association with “racialization.” To understand what is being examined here, it is necessary to challenge the possibility of doing anything here. The minute we grasp that two racialized entities can be compared, does a set of proofs—such as, but not limited to, ideas of belonging and community and, more generally, ideas of a literature or literatures, a culture or cultures—then confront us? What if the subjects we choose to engage with are not subjects at all? What if we begin our query with some attention to what makes the subject work? Or, better yet, what tale would we tell about it, if we could? Could we provide a series of ontological proofs about its being that would ground itself in the happy narrative of place, space, and race?