This essay argues that the 1957 Black-cast revival of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot stages an Africana absurd sensibility that precedes and supersedes European philosophies of absurdism. While the Continental absurd developed as a repudiation of Western reason and aspired to a universalizing assessment of the human condition, the Africana absurd is situated in the historical formation of racial slavery and colonialism. More specifically, the Africana absurd is a response to the formal meaninglessness and incoherencies of Western racial logic. Locating it within the existential and historical situation of Black theater in the Jim Crow era and attending to theatrical elements such as casting, stage props, and choreography, this essay shows how the production recasts Beckett's absurdism, metatheatricality, and antihumanism to present, rather than represent, the felt absurdity of racial modernity.

This essay argues for an energy literary criticism that centers the problem of the energy epoch as the problem of the color line. It does so by reading a set of novels—Helena María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011) and The Underground Railroad (2016)—as fossil fuel fictions that illuminate the conjuncture of energy and racial capitalism. These works unearth the racialized world making of extractive energy regimes by articulating energy's social production of race across the colonial histories and geographies of the Anthropocene. The entanglement of racialized bodies and hydrocarbon matter across biological, historical, and geological time scales in these novels formalizes what Kathryn Yusoff calls the “geologies of race.” Excavating the racial infrastructures scaffolding the Anthropocene's power grids, Viramontes's and Whitehead's georacial imaginations envision decolonial and abolitionist energy futures for Brown and Black lives.

Medieval poetic forms defy classification, and yet medievalists trade in postmedieval formalist taxonomies—sometimes without reflecting on their history. This essay takes up the case of the “bob and wheel,” a rhyming flourish best known from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas. This form, which has no given name or firmly set shape in the manuscripts in which it is found, was codified by the philologist Edwin Guest in 1838. This essay tracks the history of the interpretation of the bob and wheel across time, from the Middle Ages to the present day, and finds that it has been imagined as a tail, a game, and a cog in a machine. These phantasmic images have not only represented but also influenced readers’ experience of this form—reflecting and diffracting, bringing before-unseen patterns of meaning into focus and resonating with before-unheard synchronous frequencies.

Among the poetic modes to persist since Islam's advent, hijāʾ, or classical Arabic invective poetry, pushes the limits of permissible art while preserving aspects of court culture not found elsewhere in the premodern corpus. The harshest pieces of hijāʾ have jeopardized its very status as a proper art form, its popular appeal notwithstanding. This essay sketches the ethical and aesthetic contours of hijāʾ in postclassical Arabic literature (ca. 1000–1400), including the motivations that occasioned it. It offers as a case study the hijāʾ of the foremost Andalusian minister, Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khat.īb (d. 1375). The poet-politician's terms of abuse shed light on Granada's political strains, and they jar with a tradition that proscribes calumny altogether and calls adherents to unite in virtue and piety, not sin and slander. In practice, Ibn al-Khat.īb's sharp tongue invited physical retaliation, which forced the man to scope the lands, in search of escape.

This essay traces the literary and cultural history of resentment from the word's first arrival in English. It argues that resentment harbors the seeds of a new paradigm of anger, tied to a new sense of anger's social content: where ancient accounts of anger center on the anger of the powerful, this form of anger—embodied most famously in Nietzsche's theory of Ressentiment—addresses the anger of disempowered social agents. The argument unfolds in three stages: first, I use digital tools and a large-scale archive to analyze what early modern writers wrote about when they wrote about resentment; second, I pursue the word into the history of science and new ways of thinking about the nature of anger; and third, I read literary history and the Shakespearean plot of tragic intrigue in particular as an extended imaginative investigation of this changing set of concerns in the sociality of anger.