This essay responds to Countee Cullen's reputation within Harlem Renaissance studies as an out-of-date poet who had little concern for the “new” by reassessing his career under the sign of an older, nineteenth-century decadence. In so doing, it stages a larger exploration of the intersection between decadence and the Harlem Renaissance. I begin by sketching a genealogy of African American decadence that extends from W. E. B. Du Bois to second-generation Harlem writers like Richard Bruce Nugent and Wallace Thurman. I highlight Cullen's place within this lineage by examining the poetry from his 1927 Copper Sun in relationship to Charles Cullen's decadent illustrations for that volume. I conclude by showing how Cullen distinguishes himself among other Harlem writers in the way he uses decadence's investments in decay and afterlife to complicate the progressive views of history inherent to both the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement.

Metaphrasis is an exercise of the English humanist schoolroom that harbors both a theory of form and a method of reading. From the perspective of metaphrasis, the central question one asks of a form is not what it is. Metaphrasis encourages us to ask, instead: What is the range of this poem's formal possibilities? What variety of forms might this poem take? What variety of forms should this poem take? Or what variety of forms would this poem take under a specific set of alternative conditions, whether we conceive of those conditions along historical, aesthetic, or ethical axes? In this essay, I take up a single stanza from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1596), and I argue that where form establishes the parameters of possibility for a poem, the critical activity of metaphrasis permits us to imagine the world of the poem otherwise.

In this article, I examine divergent ideological impulses at play in the oeuvre of Aída Cartagena Portalatín (Dominican Republic, 1918–94), including Eurocentric cosmopolitanism, nationalism (of a leftist variety), and pan-Africanism. By exploring key moments in Cartagena's intellectual development and analyzing her 1978 short story collection Tablero (Blackboard), I argue that such apparent incongruities should be understood through the lens of what I call Dominican black cosmopolitanism, a writerly performance of intersectionality that strategically employs contradictory notions of culture and citizenship to illuminate the complex history of the Dominican Republic and propose a new model of national identity. Drawing on Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo's conceptualization of black cosmopolitanism and an innovative body of scholarship on Dominican history and identity, I show how Cartagena deploys opposing discourses within a single text to reimagine Dominican identity in a global context, elucidate the Afro-Dominican experience, and plumb the liberating possibilities of pan-African alliances.

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.

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.