This essay investigates the treatment of what I call infrastructural racism in fiction by Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes. Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) and Himes's Harlem Cycle novels (1957–69) chronicle vanishing urban objects and changing infrastructure to show that even as Harlem modernizes, the racist structures that undergird society do not. Ellison and Himes use ephemeral objects like signs, newspapers, and blueprints to encapsulate Harlem's transience and to suggest to readers that the neighborhood itself is a dynamic archive, continually changing yet resistant to overarching narratives of cultural loss or social progress. Himes and Ellison write about permanence and loss in mid-century Harlem in terms that disrupt the social realism associated with the novel of detection and the psychological realism associated with the novel of consciousness. Such a reading prompts a reconsideration of the critical categories–genre fiction and literary fiction–that have, until now, kept these two writers apart.

By examining a kitsch piece of nineteenth-century scrimshaw on display at the Hull Maritime Museum, Lady Gaga's infamous meat dress, and a range of mock meat products, this essay expands the scope of camp representation to theorize how vegans can, and do, draw both sustenance and pleasure from what has previously only caused pain. Appropriating products of exploitation as “vegan camp” constitutes a refusal to experience horror or disgust and instead to enjoy a surface performance of human exceptionalism, an enjoyment that parodies earnestness and exposes the desperate drive to assert human dominance over the nonhuman animal to farce. Vegan camp thus provides a mode of reading that broadens vegan-oriented scholarship beyond its current associations with the serious and sincere.

Numbers appear to have limited value for literary study, since our discipline is usually more concerned with exploring differences of interpretation than with describing the objective features of literary works. But it may be time to reexamine the assumption that numbers are useful only for objective description. Machine learning algorithms are actually bad at being objective and rather good at absorbing human perspectives implicit in the evidence used to train them. To dramatize perspectival uses of machine learning, I train models of genre on groups of books categorized by historical actors who range from Edwardian advertisers to contemporary librarians. Comparing the perspectives implicit in their choices casts new light on received histories of genre. Scientific romance and science fiction—whose shifting names have often suggested a fractured history—turn out to be more stable across two centuries than the genre we call fantasy. (TU)

Edgar Allan Poe's poetry and poetic theory maintain an awkward standing in anglophone literary criticism but offer a valuable resource to scholars of historical poetics and, more specifically, historical prosody. In poems such as “The Raven” and “The Bells” and essays such as “The Rationale of Verse,” Poe pre sents prosodic structure as a kind of palimpsest of jostling sound media (e.g., phonetic script, meter, scansion, musical form, nonhuman voices), which obey different prosodic logics when engaged by different readers, both within and across periods. In this way, Poe's poetics challenges both historicist and formalist approaches to prosody, delyricizing poetic voice by demonstrating its embeddedness in media while insisting on the multiplicity of prosodic options available when individual readers verbalize the same poetical text. Rehabilitating Poe's prosodic project helps us see poems as products of both media history and real- time performance. (PM)

Scientists have recently proposed 1610 as a candidate for the first year of the new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene. They pinpoint the rise of European colonialism and the global movement of life among ecosystems it precipitated as the triggers for measurable changes in the earth system. We used digital humanities methods to mine historical archives to evaluate the relations among colonialism, early modern globalism, and the origins of the Anthropocene. We suggest that the Anthropocene was initiated by a premodern earth system that defined life across the globe in spatial terms, furthering the goals of empire—a regime of biopower that has not been adequately acknowledged in debates on the Anthropocene. We propose that the idea of empire, rather than Enlightenment narratives of progress and scientific modernity, must be considered in our definition of the Anthropocene. (JJL and JB)

How can the digital humanities help support humanities scholarship on diversity both ideologically and technically? This essay abandons the diversity paradigm prevalent in DH—the “big tent”—for a more technically functional one: the “stack.” It proposes that DH can create a “diversity stack” (conceptually like the “Internet protocol stack”) that combines technical and theoretical strategies for advancing scholarship on diversity. From low to high, crucial levels in such a stacked approach include technical methods for dealing with multilingualism, multimedia, unrepresentative corpora, geopolitical and temporal organizations of identity, and the theory of identity. (AL)