I trace the historical connection between Gutenberg's invention of the printing press and the development of print-based cryptography to examine how war transforms the cultural meaning of books as mobile objects and as readable texts. The first section of the essay, “War and Print,” argues that the spatial portability of print is key to our understanding its role in the two forms of national aggression at the center of Michael Ondaatje's novel-namely, British colonialism and the Second World War. The second section, “War and Handwriting,” turns to The English Patient and proposes that in Ondaatje's novel the admiration of immobile works of art and the act of handwriting attempt to defy the violent human displacements that print enabled. (AB)

Langston Hughes traveled to Spain in 1937, during that Country's Civil War. He saw the Republic's Fight against Franco as an international fight against fascism, racism, and colonialism and for the rights of workers and minorities. Throughout the 1930s, Hughes organized for justice, at home and abroad, often engaging with communist and other left political organizations, like the Communist Party USA's John Reed Club, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, and the International Workers' Order (Rampersad, Life 236, 286, 355; Scott). When the war in Spain began, in 1936, workers and intellectuals who were engaged on the left came from around the world to fight against Franco's forces; these volunteers, the International Brigades, included approximately 2,800 Americans known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, of which about ninety were African American (Carroll vii; “African Americans”). Hughes went to Spain to interview black antifascist volunteers in the International Brigades and write about their experiences for the Baltimore Afro-American, VolunteerforLiberty, and other publications. Much of Hughes's writing from Spain sought to explain to people at home why men and women, and African diasporic people especially, had risked their lives to fight in Spain. Hughes profiled African Americans fighting for the first time alongside white comrades in the International Brigades, including Ralph Thornton, Thaddeus Battle, and Milton Herndon (“Pittsburgh Soldier Hero,” “Howard Man,” “Milt Herndon”). In addition to writing articles, he wrote poetry, gave radio speeches, and translated poems and plays from Spanish into English. Much of Hughes's work from the Spanish Civil War has been collected in anthologies. However, so prolific was Hughes, and so fastidious was he in saving drafts and ensuring they reach his collection at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, that many unpublished works exist in archives. The four poems here represent different poetic registers and levels of polish, and they illuminate the dynamic range of Hughes's literary production during his time in Spain.

In the Autumn of 2002, I Gave a Lecture on Mourning the Dead to Final-Year Undergraduates at the University of Cambridge studying the compulsory course on tragedy. The lecture covered the care devoted to the dead body in Sophocles's Antigone and Hamlet's reflections, over Ophelia's grave, on the “fine revolution” of the material corpse (5.1.82-83). But it also extended its range to include the then very recent excavation, for eight and a half months, at Ground Zero in search of the remains of the dead victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, and the simultaneous daily publication in the New York Times of “Portraits of Grief.” These portraits, I maintained, fulfilled a similar function to tragic drama by refocusing attention on the individual life and by finding a narrative arc to each victim's story, like Aristotle's tragic plots, which must have “a beginning, a middle, and an end” (26). While the firefighters' digging equipment at Ground Zero searched in vain for the missing remains of about 1800 people and eventually hit bedrock, the newspaper reinvested each lost person with significance, finding a value and a pattern in the person's life.

In this essay I address the remediation of the centuries-old East African practice of poetic dialogue in the twenty-first-century digital social network of Facebook. Focusing on an online duel between two young poets from Mombasa, I demonstrate how East Africa's new media are transforming traditional poetic conventions in Swahili. Even sites that endeavor to preserve authentic literary Swahili have become in practice controversial crossroads of language, culture, and identity. By bringing voices of Swahili cultural authority, which draw from the East, into sustained contact with voices of the contemporary urban youth culture, which draws from the West, these new media are ultimately opening new terrains for literary production and debate.