In 1891 Oscar Wilde argued that “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.” A hundred years later, the Anglo-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare MBE takes up where Wilde left off, arguing that “[t]o be an artist you have to be a good liar.” This essay explores how Shonibare reinvents Wilde's antirealism for a globalized, postcolonial world. Building on Leela Gandhi's notion of “interested autonomy,” I argue that in works such as his 2001 photo series Dorian Gray, Shonibare turns to Wilde's aestheticism as a means of upending the relation between realism and politics found in Chinua Achebe's critique of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, rediscovering the disparate racial and sexual geographies at stake in Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and in Albert Lewin's 1945 film version of it. Shonibare's post-colonial decadence, I argue, demonstrates how decadent aestheticism may become central to postcolonial imaginings of the real.

Norman Mailer was haunted by the specter of social death—a specter created for him by living as a Jew between the parentheses created by the Holocaust and the prospect of nuclear Armageddon. As an antidote to social death, Mailer sought its opposite—sovereignty within and beyond his writer's sphere. In the boxer Muhammad Ali, Mailer found an exemplar of the seizure of sovereignty within and beyond a sphere. The Fight chronicles the heavyweight championship battle between Ali and George Foreman in Zaire, a country treated like a private bank account by its dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. I argue that Mailer regrettably failed to emphasize fully the fact that Zaire was exhibit B (the Vietnam War being the writer's inevitable exhibit A) in the case Mailer passionately made that the Cold War brutalized the American psyche.

The modernist privileging of irony and detached contemplation frequently combined with a recognition of the social and artistic significance of affect. The relation between melodramatic structures of feeling and modernist innovation is evident in two plays of the interwar years: Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann's Happy End and W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood's On the Frontier. Scholars need to develop a vocabulary that complements the customary critical emphasis on modernist “irony,” “estrangement,” and “difficulty” and that can be used to reconstruct the full force of the modernist uses of affect. Instead of estranging melodrama to make it palatable to an audience trained in high modernism, the negotiations between sentimentality and avant-garde aesthetics in Happy End and On the Frontier trigger a backward dialectical movement in which the modernist rallying call to “make it new” blurs into the established patterns of melodrama.

From the mid-1960s onward, Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian writers have turned to the question of Palestine as a model of political and aesthetic innovation. Taking the Moroccan cultural journal Souffles-Anfas as an early, paradigmatic example of the literary turn to Palestine in the Maghreb, I argue that writers such as Abdellatif Laâbi and Abdelkebir Khatibi used Palestine as a springboard for “cultural decolonization,” reactivating global anticolonial discourses in order to articulate a relational, cross-colonial Maghrebi identity. Focusing on discussions of language, poetic form, and cultural autonomy, I show that Palestine served as a point of reference in debates on postcolonial Maghrebi culture. Without muting the ethical pitfalls inherent in representing a heterogeneous anticolonial struggle in a postcolonial context, I take this example of cross-colonial poetics as an invitation to rethink along multidirectional, transnational lines the way we approach Maghrebi and, more generally, postcolonial literature and culture.

The invitation poem, in which the beloved is urged to come away to an idealized place, is among the most enduring genres of European love poetry. The tradition begins with the biblical Song of Songs, which sets several important precedents: a dialogic framework, a close association of lover and landscape, and a sense of love as exile. Medieval and Renaissance invitation poems follow the Song of Songs but shift its emphases toward monologue, materialism, and importunity. Milton thus inherits a dual tradition of invitational poetry, both aspects of which figure prominently in Paradise Lost. Recognizing the traditional features of the genre therefore illuminates significant moments in the epic, including, notably, Eve's final speech. The invitational tropes in this passage reveal how Eve reconceives of exile as homecoming and how she reestablishes a sense of radical mutuality with Adam by completing a dialogue that began before the Fall.

Kenneth W. Warren offers a salutary historicizing of the field of African American literary studies that reaffirms the historical and, hence, provisional nature of group identity. His book What Was African American Literature? views black literary studies through a skeptical lens that reveals the discipline's continuing investments in cultural “blackness” as nostalgic, transhistorical, and exceptionalist. In much the same way, scholars of United States history and literature have deconstructed—with little controversy—the transhistorical notion of America and exposed the Cold War origins of “American studies.” Yet responses to What Was African American Literature? have been at best lukewarm and at worst harshly critical. Why do the implications of Warren's argument seem so worrisome? Do they suggest we must choose between the field's historical and theoretical integrity and its institutional existence? Can the critical tradition of African American literature retain its institutional authority and its progressive political integrity without resorting to anachronistic concepts of black particularity, concepts through which “the limitations of the black condition get rewritten as a paradoxically fortunate turn” (19)?

This question of disciplinary meaning—which I ask from the viewpoint of the humanities generally—is larger than the question of disciplinary identity now preoccupying “DH” itself, as insiders call it. Having reached a critical mass of participants, publications, conferences, grant competitions, institutionalization (centers, programs, and advertised jobs), and general visibility, the field is vigorously forming an identity. Recent debates about whether the digital humanities are a “big tent” (Jockers and Worthey), “who's in and who's out?” (Ramsay), whether “you have to know how to code [or be a builder]” (Ramsay, “On Building”), the need for “more hack, less yack” (Cecire, “When Digital Humanities”; Koh), and “who you calling untheoretical?” (Bauer) witness a dialectics of inclusion and exclusion not unlike that of past emergent fields. An ethnographer of the field, indeed, might take a page from Claude Lévi-Strauss and chart the current digital humanities as something like a grid of affiliations and differences between neighboring tribes. Exaggerating the differences somewhat, as when a tribe boasts its uniqueness, we can thus say that the digital humanities—much of which affiliates with older humanities disciplines such as literature, history, classics, and the languages; with the remediation of older media such as books and libraries; and ultimately with the value of the old itself (history, archives, the curatorial mission)—are not the tribe of “new media studies,” under the sway of the design, visual, and media arts; Continental theory; cultural criticism; and the avant-garde new. Similarly, despite significant trends toward networked and multimodal work spanning social, visual, aural, and haptic media, much of the digital humanities focuses on documents and texts in a way that distinguishes the field's work from digital research in media studies, communication studies, information studies, and sociology. And the digital humanities are exploring new repertoires of interpretive or expressive “algorithmic criticism” (the “second wave” of the digital humanities proclaimed in “The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0” [3]) in a way that makes the field not even its earlier self, “humanities computing,” alleged to have had narrower technical and service-oriented aims. Recently, the digital humanities' limited engagement with identity and social-justice issues has also been seen to be a differentiating trait—for example, by the vibrant #transformDH collective, which worries that the digital humanities (unlike some areas of new media studies) are dominantly not concerned with race, gender, alternative sexualities, or disability.

THE ORDINARY GLOSS WAS THE MOST WIDELY USED EDITION OF THE BIBLE IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES AND WELL INTO THE SIXTEENTH century. Medievalists know the commentary element as the Gloss to which theologians as diverse as Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, John Wyclif, and Martin Luther habitually referred. As the foremost vehicle for medieval exegesis, the Gloss framed biblical narratives for a wide range of vernacular religious literature, from Dante's Divine Comedy to French drama to a Middle English retelling of the Jonah story, Patience.