This essay argues for the primacy of energy as an impetus in the writing of the Sudanese author al-Tayyib Salih. Taking his most famous novel, موسم الهجرة إلى الشمال (1966; Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shimāl; Season of Migration to the North), as a case study, it explores the significance of climatic factors and of changes to energy regimes in the novel's plot, characterization, intertextuality, and postcolonial critique. Through the character of Mustafa Saʿid, it argues for a posthuman impulse in the novel, as Mustafa uncannily transforms from Faustian archetype to a fantastical, nonhuman force. It concludes by shifting to alternative forms of energy within Salih's writing, as the spiritual energy of the Sufi “unseen” meets the unheeding world of atoms, supercharged with new energies in the modern era.

This article argues that a reliance on material texts tied to the concept of improvement—such as picturesque engravings, diagrams, and account books—pushed the early abolitionist movement toward a reforming, ameliorationist ethic that disavowed revolutionary action and immediate emancipation. Although the term improvement had broad social applicability by the late eighteenth century, its original connections to land management made it an especially important concept for the abolitionist debate. Integrating book history with studies of enslavement and abolition, I show how abolitionists’ use of visual-textual forms such as diagrams and account books created an emphasis on gradual improvement. In response, Black abolitionists both emphasized concepts other than improvement and presented their works in different material forms. Olaudah Equiano and Quobna Ottabah Cugoano adapted the genre of autobiography to demonstrate how their own ostensible improvements did not have the effects anticipated by the logic of white abolitionists, ultimately undercutting the usefulness of improvement as a guiding concept for abolitionism.

This essay traces the emergence of Anthropocene fantasy through an analysis of three multivolume series—George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, Robin Hobb's Realm of the Elderlings, and N. K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth. Each of these series repurposes the conventions of epic fantasy to analyze the ideological underpinnings of anthropogenic crisis. Among the most important tropes revised are fantasy infrastructures, which, in Anthropocene fantasy, frequently manifest a problematic division between the human and the nonhuman. Consequently, characters’ responses to these infrastructures often reflect these novels’ ecological politics. The surrender of agency associated with the abandonment of ancient infrastructures further indicates Anthropocene fantasy's interest in reimagining the individualistic mode of human agency that drives so many novel plotlines, fantasy and realist alike. Anthropocene fantasy's revision of its own problematic genre infrastructures thus has implications not only for the epic fantasy but for the novel form more broadly.

This essay engages with James Baldwin's work on prison rape in the early 1970s: his directing of John Herbert's play Fortune and Men's Eyes while in Turkey (1969–70), his nonfiction book No Name in the Street (1972), and his penultimate novel, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974). Over the course of these works, Baldwin theorized that sexual violence constitutes racial capitalism by mediating between the two state-organized institutions tasked with securing the primitive accumulation and surplus value on which racial capitalism relies: the family (and, more broadly, heterosexuality) and the prison (and, more broadly, policing). In turn, Baldwin helps converge two intellectual traditions that developed after him, the black radical and Marxist feminist traditions, in order to explain how sexual violence expropriates both forced productive labor and unpaid reproductive labor through its production of racialized gender and kinlessness.

This article analyzes how Chinese writers in the early twentieth century translated and appropriated Russian literature through the intermediary of Japanese scholarly and creative writing. It traces how Japan began as the primary—and in some cases only—cultural broker in the Chinese reception of Russian literature during the late Qing dynasty and how its impact diminished as Western European sources became viable competitors. To illuminate Japan's unique mediating role in shaping Chinese understanding of both Russian literature and China's own literary and linguistic legacy, this article examines Wu Tao's 1907 relay translation of Chekhov's “The Black Monk” from Japanese. By probing the Sino-Japanese cultural connections that gave birth to this translation and comparing it with two later Chinese renderings from English and Russian versions, this article reflects on the factors that determine how intermediaries function in transcultural negotiations.