The Photograph is violent.

—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Who are you, who will look at these photographs, and by what right, and what will you do about it?

—James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

In His Entry for Eye in Le Dictionnaire Critique (1929-30), Georges Bataille Refers to the Human Compulsion to Look as a response to a “blind thirst for blood,” triggered by the spectacle of extreme violence, including torture. But why, Bataille wonders, would someone's “absurd eyes be attracted, like a cloud of flies, to something so repugnant?” (19). He attributes to the human eye the cannibalistic disposition that comes from our “inexplicable acuity of horrors” and from the disturbing fascination that the eye itself exerts over our sensibility. The extreme seductiveness of the eye, Bataille hints, is probably “at the very edge of horror” (17). He connects the unstable edge that separates such contradictory responses with the idea of the eye as a critical tool, in which “critical” refers to the act of discerning and the act of cutting—as shown in the infamous opening of Tuis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's film Un chien andalou (“An Andalusian Dog” [1929]), when the eye of a young woman is sliced open by a razor in front of the camera. This violence against embodied (and sexualized) vision points not only to the notion of the eye as a misleading mimetic apparatus but also to the image of the eye as a hole or gap. The split eye is resignified as ocular replication, which, unexpectedly, triggers the proliferation of images and the loss of sight that come from seeing too much. Indeed, the swarm of eyes that populates Bataille's visual imagery grimly alludes to the compulsion to watch violent acts to the point of blindness.

In 2009 william pannapacker pronounced the digital humanities to be “the first ‘next big thing’ in a longtime” promising to reconfigure and reinvigorate the humanities. The same could now plausibly be said about the environmental humanities with the recent rise of dedicated academic centers (at, e.g., KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Sweden; Princeton University; the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the University of Utah), grant-funded projects (like the Sawyer Seminar on the Environmental Humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the consortium Humanities for the Environment), and faculty positions. If the digital and environmental humanities have been ascendant amid what Christopher Newfield describes as the “unmaking” of public higher education and what Richard Grusin terms the “crisis humanities,” such an assessment invites the question of whether the ecological digital humanities (EcoDH) might serve to combine the most saleable facets of the digital humanities and the environmental humanities for university stakeholders who promote applied humanities work outside academia or, alternatively, a hybrid method for researching, teaching, and designing cultural responses to structures of ecological and social precarity (Grusin 80).

This essay traces the meanings and effects of postcolonial authors' recent refashioning of classical historical fiction. That refashioning has two aims: a materialist cartography that counters the nationalist vocation of classical historical fiction by revealing the supranational, global aspirations of colonial capitalism as a system; and an effort to retrieve from colonial modernity the residues of premodern, often presecular modes of solidarity that persist in yet lie athwart the colonial-modern. The analysis focuses on two novels: Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger (1992) and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies (2006). It engages with work on the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, with theoretical critiques of utopia, and with the Lukácsian concept of typification (and Ian Baucom's criticism of it). The essay concludes by linking the birth of postcolonial historical fiction to the form of finance capital undergirding our contemporary moment—a form of capital that reprises while intensifying that which held sway at the moment of historical fiction's first emergence.

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.

Historical Narrative and Memory: The Former is Usually the Site of Power; the Latter, for Jean Franco in Cruel Modernity, is the site of force. Historical narrative represents Latin American nations as emerging—or, in Brazil's case, emerged—markets progressing on a seamless curve toward a glossy, technologically sophisticated, communicative hypermodernity, whereas memory is the desperate, slow, brute force of the people who refuse to forget the unmitigated cruelty of the second half of the twentieth century in Latin America. Memory here is the continental but subaltern force of family and friends who are still noisily waiting to bury the broken remains of their disappeared sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, comrades in hope or children of a utopic vision. Forensic subaltern memories document the phantasmagoric crimes committed against fragmented and maimed bodies, buried in mass graves or in the depths of lakes from Patagonia to the border between Mexico and the United States, interrupting the gleaming historical narratives that describe the slow but steady progress toward national development. In Cruel Modernity, Franco is part of this force: she is a forensic memory worker, examining the crime scenes, the tortured, raped, mutilated bodies, describing in awful detail who did what to whom, with what instruments, and in what order. One of the most striking aspects of Cruel Modernity is Franco's refusal to look away. Each chapter provides “thick description” of these crimes, as Franco tries to comprehend the excess of the acts perpetrated, the motivations of the perpetrators, the effects on the victims. Several rationales

The global linguasphere is in a state of ecological and humanitarian crisis. In a powerful meditation in pmla, simon gikandi notes that the loss of any language (and of a culture sustained by it) is worthy of mourning and that language death around the globe is a matter of urgent collective concern. Relating great emotion when the “UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger confronted me with the bleak reality of language endangerment measured in maps, graphs, and data sets,” he ponders the ethical and political stakes of widespread language loss (9). He ends by quoting (and translating) a poem by the anthropologist Miguel León-Portilla “captur[ing] what happens when a language dies” (13), and he builds to a stark closing dictum: “Letting a language die is an injustice, a denial of will to those who speak it” (14). In this forceful essay, metaphorical discourse of language death gives way to a poignant elegy that registers a strong affective and political investment in the sustainment of languages.

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 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.

Simultaneous But Distant Events in Collision: In 1981, New York University (NYU) Celebrated the 150th Anniversary of its founding with a series of notable speakers and events; in rural Guatemala that year, the military began to carry out a policy of genocide against the Mayan Indians. In New York, the much-awaited English translation of Roland Barthes's treatise on photography, La chambre claire, appeared as Camera Lucida; in Nicaragua, the CIA-backed contras waged war on the Sandinista government, which had passed the Agrarian Reform Law to redistribute land to the campesinos who labored on it. In the United States, leading physicists announced advances “toward a unified theory”: “an integral work of art” made up of “threads in a tapestry,” a scientific weaving with the almost phantasmagorical ability to replace all “the confusion of the past” with “a simple and elegant theory” (Glashow 494-95). Abroad, magical realism officially became what Homi Bhabha would later call “the literary language of the emergent post-colonial world” (7). An example of the genre, Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie, won the Booker Prize. In the United States, magical realism came to stand, “as surely as Carmen Miranda's fruity cornucopias,” for a reified, homogeneous, and consumable “Latin America” (Molloy 374) and served as Latin America's new entrée into the exclusive party held by comparative literature. Gabriel García Márquez received the Nobel the following year.

This essay discusses strategic efforts to develop new digital research tools and approaches as key elements of an inter-disciplinary research initiative in progress, Inscribing Environmental Memory in the Icelandic Sagas (IEM), which aims to study aspects of Icelandic literature, history, archaeology, environment, and geography in order to better understand societal responses to environmental change over the longue durée. The essay showcases a particular digital humanities project, Icelandic Saga Map (ISM), which not only provides an extremely useful tool for helping achieve many of the identified aims and methodological needs of an integrated environmental humanities initiative such as IEM but also is a valuable example of how innovative digital humanities tools can foster new research trajectories and open up new horizons for interdisciplinary engagement and synthesis of knowledge and diverse data.

One of the Principal Challenges Facing the Study of Global Modernisms, as of Any Transnational Cultural Phenomenon, is the question of scale. In declaring the contemporary world to be “one, and unequal,” several recent theorizations of world literature rest on the foundational assumption of a unified—albeit uneven—planetary scale (Moretti, “Conjectures” 56; see also Casanova 62-74; WREC 6-12). As such they model the dynamic of literary circulation across world regions according to the geographic distances, as well as the disproportionate access to socioeconomic and cultural resources, that separate and distinguish the world's centers from their peripheries. These distances, and the inequalities they generate, are perceived as the necessary by-products of two spatial logics, that of the expanding world market and that of the modern Westphalian system of sovereign and competing nation-states. To posit the modern world as a singular system has the undoubted merit of acknowledging the structural connectedness of its operative inequalities, arising from the territorial partition of the globe by the imperial powers during the final decades of the nineteenth century and from its simultaneous unification in the wake of accelerating trade and new infrastructures of transport and communication. Nevertheless, the premise of a singular modernity (Jameson 142) has been repeatedly challenged (Chakrabarty 6-16; Mitchell; Scott 113-15; Orsini). It has been faulted for its developmentalist logic, involving an implied or explicit adherence to the related assumptions of linear or stadial historicism and spatial diffusionism, which together reduce the negotiated impact of modernity on the world's far-flung regions to a process of top-down modernization originating in and imposed by the West. The force of this critique is blunted once the world system (Wallerstein; Hopkins et al.) is grasped as a profoundly uneven totality, allowing us to view the multiply differentiated space-times that coexist in the global present as produced by the imbalances constituting the world system as such (in literary scholarship, see Anderson, “Modernity”; Moretti, Modern Epic 50-52; Wollaeger 13-14; Lazarus 232-41, WREC 1-95; for corresponding debates in historiography and the social sciences, see Harootunian 62-63; Cooper 113-49; Chibber).

Among The Many Significant Contributions of Raúl Coronado's A World Not to Come: A History Of Latino Writing and Print Culture is its vivid account of a lost Latino public sphere, a little-known milieu of hispanophone intellectual culture dating back to the early nineteenth century and formed in the historical interstices of Spanish American colonies, emergent Latin American nations, and the early imperial interests of the United States. In this respect, the book builds on the foundational work of Kirsten Silva Gruesz's Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing, which gave definitive shape to the field of early Latino studies by addressing what were then (and in some ways still are) the “methodological problems of proposing to locate the ‘origins’ of Latino writing in the nineteenth century.” Gruesz unfolded a vast panorama of forgotten Spanish-language print culture throughout the United States, from Philadelphia and New York to New Orleans and California, in which letters, stories, essays, and above all poetry bequeathed what she showed convincingly were “important, even crucial, ways of understanding the world” that had been largely lost to history (x). Coronado's book carries forward this project of recovery, exploring a particular scene of early Latino writing centered in Texas during its last revolutionary decades as one of the Interior Provinces of New Spain, its abrupt transition to an independent republic, and its eventual annexation by the United States. As a “history of textuality” rather than a study of literary culture per se (28), the book tells the story of the first printing presses in Texas but also evinces the importance of manuscript circulation as well as private and sometimes unfinished texts. A World Not to Come concerns both print culture and origins but refuses to fetishize either, attending to the past not to “the degree that it is a measure of the future,” as Rosaura Sánchez once put it, but for the very opposite reason: because it portended a future that was never realized (qtd. in Gruesz, Ambassadors xi).

Indigenous communities are marrying ecological humanities and digital humanities in ways that productively expand the definition of both terms. On the ecological side, indigenous activism argues for the sustainability and interdependence of the natural and the human. In this, it challenges many of the same things that ecocriticism challenges—the supremacy or distinctiveness of the human, anthropocentric notions of time—though such activism predates ecocriticism quite a bit. Many traditional indigenous narratives assert close affinity, even identity, between a people and their river, for instance, or a people and their animals, or people and trees; they were figuring nonhuman agency long before Bruno Latour. On the DH side, indigenous people are engaging electronic media outside major DH structures and funding. These insurgent engagements challenge the very definition of DH as a field (with its predilection for large-scale archives, metadata, and open access) while also raising questions about the sustainability of the digital itself. Despite the implicit teleologies still assumed by many people—from oral to written to digital—indigenous ecological digital humanities (EcoDH) never present themselves as the end point or answer. Rather, they are part of a vast and diverse communicative ecosystem that includes petroglyphs, living oral traditions, newsletters, wampum, sci-fi novels, baskets, and language apps.