In the early 1960s two editions of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart were published with competing sets of illustrations. The first, by Dennis Carabine, illustrates a realist novel, the second, by Uche Okeke, a modernist one. Reading Achebe's iconic novel through its early publication history and for its visual images shows how the famous ending of Things Fall Apart turns, stylistically, to the impenetrable flatness of the modernist surface. At mid-century, modernist style could be made to serve realist imperatives, and Achebe's flat style challenges colonial modes of literary representation and the myth of modernist primitivism in the visual arts. This essay stresses the importance of the visual image to mid-century anglophone literature and the importance of modernist style to the poetics of decolonization.

Engaging with and amending the terms of debates about poetry performance, I locate the origins of the default, neutral style of contemporary academic poetry readings in secular performance and religious ritual, exploring the influence of the beat poets, the black arts movement, and the African American church. Line graphs of intonation patterns demonstrate what I call monotonous incantation, a version of the neutral style that is characterized by three qualities: (1) the repetition of a falling cadence within a narrow range of pitch; (2) a flattened affect that suppresses idiosyncratic expression of subject matter in favor of a restrained, earnest tone; and (3) the subordination of conventional intonation patterns dictated by syntax, and of the poetic effects of line length and line breaks, to the prevailing cadence and slow, steady pace. This style is popularly known as “poet voice.” Recordings of four contemporary poets—Natasha Trethewey, Louise Glück, Michael Ryan, and Juliana Spahr—demonstrate this style, which contrasts with more expressive, idiosyncratic readings by poets as distinct as Frank Bidart and Kenneth Goldsmith.

This essay combines a history of publication with a discussion of the sonic dimensions of Roger Williams's seventeenth-century Narragansett-English vocabulary, A Key into the Language of America, modeling one way literary scholars might think beyond print-centric analyses. Drawing on historical reprintings as well as Native American linguistic reappropriations of A Key, I argue that cross-cultural encounter emerges most powerfully in relation to Williams's text not as a vestige of the past, accessible through the dialogues or the language, but as a function of the text's reproduction, the audiences' imagination of its reproducibility, and the points at which it fails to be a mimetic record.

As her family name suggests, Jane Eyre is exceptionally responsive to changes in the weather. In her eponymous “autobiography,” Jane's ability to predict future events and assume an embodied—yet occasionally omniscient—insight alerts us to the ways in which Charlotte Brontë‘s fiction leverages the rise of climate science as a basis for successful female authorship. In opposition to the prevailing belief of the Victorian medical establishment that storms prompted hysteria and exacerbated symptoms of women's biological “periodicity,” Brontë‘s first published novel draws the sensitive body and insightful mind of its female protagonist into close alliance. Far from reflecting a nervous pathology, Jane's empowered responses to the air demonstrate the ways in which meteorological concepts such as weather wisdom and lunarism prove vital to nineteenth-century fiction.

A long-standing misreading of Jane Eyre is that Rochester's wife, Bertha Mason, is locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall. In fact, she resides on the third floor. This mistake has implications for readings of the novel and for recent critical methodologies such as “surface,” “denotative,” and “dialectical” reading strategies. Jane Eyre associates the spaces of Thornfield with psychological registers that are in turn associated with types of meaning making. This essay delineates these registers by mapping them onto the Lacanian schema of imaginary, symbolic, and real orders, thus drawing out the novel's engagement with a nascent nineteenth-century depth psychology while noting how the novel itself militates against so-called surface reading.

Never having known Assia Djebar, i can only speak of the effect her writing has had on me, above all one of her first works, Les enfants du nouveau monde (Children of the New World), created as Algerian independence became a reality, inaugurating a postcolonial nation full of promise and contradiction. In this novel Djebar wrote of Algeria at a moment, 1961-62, when it was on the threshold of its becoming, the very moment of the invention of Algeria, when the coming laborious construction of Algeria, which continues today, was already visible. The moment when the unyielding violence of the struggle to invent this new country, nation, people, and culture might have ceased, in a site subject to a violence that had proceeded endlessly, terrifyingly, since 1954, since the massacre in Sétif in 1945, since the French invasion of 1830, since the fly-whisk incident and the blockade of Algiers in 1827. By 1961 Algeria had for centuries been defined and constructed by violence. In Les enfants du nouveau monde we encounter the trace of a moment when the participants in the Algerian revolution and war had been shaken to the core of their being by the terror of that struggle and risking of life, a moment when what Frantz Fanon called “le problème de l'homme” (374), the invention of a human being beyond the consuming circles of Eurocentric hegemony, was of the utmost urgency. A moment when Algerians were about to give form and reality to Algeria. Here Djebar wrote of this Algeria in a future perfect and perfect future of that moment, an Algeria that would no sooner be born than vanish, an Algeria that still, today, will have been.

The death of assia djebar on 7 february 2015 marks the end of an era in literary and world history. The last survivor of the generation of Algerian writers who took up the pen in the mid-1950s as their country embarked on its historic struggle for independence from France, Djebar continued writing long after the deaths of Mouloud Feraoun (1962), Kateb Yacine (1989), Mouloud Mammeri (1989), and Mohammed Dib (2003). With her death, the age of decolonization and African revolution as it resonated in literature seems truly to have come to a close. Djebar was the only woman among the Algerian literary pioneers, and her work, which includes novels, essays, documentary films, and plays, explores, above all, the experience of Algerian women. Challenging official nationalism, these counternarratives tell stories about women's roles in war in which the political doesn't efface the personal and victory doesn't signal the end of suffering or the fading of loss. This oppositional stance was carried even into the rituals observed in the aftermath of her death. Official services conducted at the airport and the Palais de la Culture in Algiers were shadowed and indeed overshadowed by less-formal ceremonies in which family, friends, and members of Algerian women's movements recited poetry and chanted Berber songs.

Readers of assia djebar's oeuvre are well aware of her commitment to restoring algerian women to their proper place in the history of their nation's anticolonial struggle. Beginning with her third novel, Les enfants du nouveau monde (1965; Children of the New World), a text offering a panoramic view of women's participation in the Algerian War, Djebar signaled her intent to chart women's political and psychological awakening during the anticolonial struggle. In contrast to this early text, Djebar's penultimate work, La femme sans sépulture (2002; “Woman without a Tomb”), focuses on one revolutionary figure: Yamina Echaïb Oudaï, known as Zoulikha, the martyr of Cherchell.

There is something daunting about writing an homage to an artist who just died. One is faced with questions of proximity, expertise, and knowledge: questions on how to evoke the person and oeuvre without giving oneself too much prominence, questions on the intended audience and adequate tonality as well as the standpoint one is speaking from. This is especially true with the Algerian writer, filmmaker, historian, and playwright Assia Djebar: “As a Moslem woman, educated in the French system while her country was still under de-facto colonial rule and witness to eight years of brutal war while still in her twenties, Djebar is the only writer of her sex and her generation who has managed an impressive output both before and after her country's accession to independence” (Zimra, Afterword 163). As Clarisse Zimra further reminds us in “A Daughter's Call,” “By the time of her death, Assia Djebar had been writing for nearly sixty years.” The range of her training, her professional experience on three continents (Africa, Europe, North America), and her practice of different genres are just as impressive. She received several prestigious awards, including the FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1979 for her film La nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua (1978; “The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua”) and the Neustadt Prize (1996), often considered a gateway to the Nobel Prize (for which she was short-listed twice). Elected to the Académie Française in 2005, she is, as Zimra remarks, “une immortelle.”

In a recent book i suggested that what haunts the field of southern studies is not the proverbial specter so much as an insistent materiality that troubles and illuminates the spaces, communities, and minds of the southern United States. I made a case for human materiality, in its diverse manifestations and histories, as an important methodological tool in the study of the cultural logics, illogics, and resistances that have shaped and sometimes stymied life in what Leigh Anne Duck calls “the nation's region” (Watson 9-27). Here I want to make a briefer but complementary case for the centrality of other materialities in scholarship on that region. To access them effectively, southern studies will need to forge closer, more creative ties with the field of environmental studies and with the habit of mind that Timothy Morton calls “the ecological thought.”

Recently, scholars have questioned the need for southern literary studies. Why have a separate field when so much scholarship in the past decade has sought to break down the southern isolationism that characterized studies of the South for most of the twentieth century? Global South studies and the new southern studies have shaped the field and pushed it in this direction, while transatlantic, transpacific, and even planetary studies are part of the academic vernacular.

Recently, news outfits, pundits, and academics have taken to referring to “the global south.” In many respects the south finally matters. As a political moniker, this term comprises the countries in Africa, Central and Latin America, and most of Asia. It designates the entities with medium or low human development, according to United Nations indexes.

This entry into southern studies spins off a certain strain of black cultural criticism, especially as it concerns my engagement with black speculative text and what I call speculative race theory. The black speculative project—what Alondra Nelson and others roughly twenty years ago were terming afrofuturism, an idea that has since gained popularity as a branded aesthetic interest—is driven by literary, visual, musical, and various other intellectual work that evidences a dynamic intersection of race, space, time, and newer technologies. Also prominent in much of this text is a sequence of tropes common to post-Souls cultural production, particularly narratives of containment and flight coupled with representations of selected subjectivities as more provisional than guaranteed. Al Green's tune “Gotta Find a New World” comes to mind as a poignant escapist critique, and Syreeta Wright's “Black Maybe” serves as a haunting inventory of tense potentialities. In these instances the futurist sentiment is present, but the expected tech might be slightly latent. Many of these anticipations—relatively successful or not—are launched from the south, from a south, or from a southern idea. This set of remarks is as much a black speculative venture as it is a southernist exercise. Or perhaps it is the one in theory because it is in fact the other.