“I want a holophrase.” The opening of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris has provided a critical entry to this difficult poem for many critics and readers, ever since Julia Briggs’s notes informed us that the concept derives from Jane Harrison’s Themis. The central hope (and lack) expressed by the speaker’s “want” is echoed by the poem’s own search for a holistic mode of expression that can articulate the flâneuse’s full sensory, emotional, and intellectual experience of the city of Paris. The fundamental...

By the fifth line of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem, the author has already invoked advertisements for three different products. The “ZIG-ZAG” cigarette papers, “LION NOIR” shoe polish, and “CACAO BLOOKER” hot chocolate posters she mentions—presumably glued to the walls of the “NORD-SUD” metro line she names beforehand—are united not only by their commodity status, but also by the particular kind of imagery mobilized to promote their sale. The head of the “Zig-Zag man” that appeared on posters at...

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s midcentury psychological fantasy Black Narcissus (1947) is enjoying something of a resurgence, available to be rewatched and taught more widely than ever before. For much of the 70-plus years since its release, the movie was difficult to find except as written descriptions, movie stills or poster art (fig. 1). It was a tantalizing entry in filmmaker lore that the likes of Martin Scorsese and Tilda Swinton cite as formative influences, while ordinary...

Modernist studies’ broadening engagement with the transnational has led to greater attention to mobile forms such as the little magazine. Despite difficulties (as Kate Hartke reminds us in this cluster) such as paper shortages and problems with staffing, shipping, and supply, the periodical’s ability to travel between ports separated by oceans or within cafés divided by ideological walls enabled it to give rise to an array of modernist movements, driven by writers, editors, and readers committed...

Julia de Burgos (1914–53), one of Puerto Rico’s greatest poets, haunts the American literary imagination from the borders of the modern. Her ghostly presence, desperate and furious, searches for interlocutors on the bridge to Welfare Island, historically a warehouse for the poor, the criminalized and sick just east of the United Nations. Julia’s barefoot figure wandering across that bridge in her bata, just as she describes in letters to her sister Consuelo in 1953, positions her to catch the eye of today’s visitors to the newly restored and renamed Roosevelt Island, which offers no physical reminders of this important Puerto Rican and American poet’s residence there. Nothing in the island’s glistening white granite park mentions the two poems Burgos wrote in English when Roosevelt Island was Welfare Island, months before her death in Spanish Harlem.

The modernity of colonial nations has often seemed belated, but in Australia it has been especially troubled by ongoing doubts about the authenticity of the nation itself. According to Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra in Dark Side of the Dream: “Legitimacy is a raw and buried issue in the contemporary Australian consciousness for good reasons. The current system of government, law and property derives from a chain of judicial acts which leads inexorably back to the founding event itself: an act of invasion by which the Aboriginal owners of the land were dispossessed with some cruelty and without compensation.” The same might be said of other colonial cultures, but Hodge and Mishra highlight the way in which “bastard” became a characteristic term of affection in Australia, arguing that “the basis of identity that it constructs is a shared sense of illegitimacy,” one related to a more deep-seated “bastard complex” ( Dark Side of the Dream, 23). For this reason, “white Australians have had a continuous need to generate new forms of the foundation myth, which exists to annul, defuse, displace and negate the intractable conditions of the foundation event” (26). That Australia is a nation of bastards is perhaps echoed by the country’s lack of an unambivalent foundation moment, a proper “birthday”; for when might modern Australia be said to have begun? Debates about the suitability of January 26 as Australia Day have lately come to prominence again, since it marks the date in 1788 when Governor Phillip raised the British flag at what is now Sydney, and many Indigenous people rightly feel that “Invasion Day” hardly merits general celebration. Besides, outside the eastern states, South and Western Australia also mark their own dates of colonial takeover. The anniversary of Australian Federation on January 1, 1901 was widely commemorated only on its centenary in 2001, and with little public enthusiasm compared to the solemn annual response to Anzac Day on April 25. Invested with forging a popular version of white male Australian identity, Anzac Day has traditionally had a stronger claim as a truly national foundation moment, but it is shared with New Zealand—which has Waitangi Day, marking the 1840 treaty with the Māori people, as its national day. Anzac Day also celebrates another seaborne invasion, when in 1915 Australasian troops were part of a failed Allied assault on the Ottoman Empire. Will Australia finally come into its own if and when it becomes a republic? “Where is Australia, singer, do you know?” asked the poet Bernard O’Dowd in his 1912 visionary poem The Bush, only to answer himself, “She is a prophecy to be fulfilled!” Implicit in the where of O’Dowd’s question is when will the “real” nation come into being? The status of modernism in Australia has been similarly fraught, even when narrowed to the field of poetry, since here too there has been a sense of inauthenticity, belatedness, or deferral. For example, the relative absence of a strong local avant-garde heritage meant that, as late as the 1970s, the diffuse grouping of baby boomer poets that John Tranter dubbed “the Generation of ’68” were apt to see themselves as the first true moderns, impelled as they were by sixties youth culture and recent experimental American poetics. In influential late twentieth-century monographs, both Andrew Taylor and Paul Kane have argued—for somewhat different reasons—that Australian poetic modernism was stalled by the failure of a romantic tradition to take hold. Yet, leaving aside the ever-porous relationship between romanticism and modernism, Taylor and Kane each reflected an older canonical sense of modernist poetics strongly inflected by Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence and a concern with poetic patrimony. Kane’s account is more nuanced, and more invested in problems of romantic identity and self-authorization, and yet he seems to concur with Taylor’s view that Kenneth Slessor is “Australia’s first strong poet,” and therefore a founding father of local modernism.

1959: The Atlantic magazine devotes its April issue to “Africa South of the Sahara.” Articles on the politics of decolonization frame a large number of contributions on art and culture. A short story by Chinua Achebe appears alongside the work of Nadine Gordimer, Tom Mboya, Léon Damas, Léopold Sédar-Senghor, Amos Tutuola, and David Diop. “The Sacrificial Egg” is Achebe’s first story published in the United States, and its timing supports the US release of his novel Things Fall Apart. Unlike that classic novel, the story begins in a recognizably modern Nigeria, with a young clerk named Julius Obi sitting alone in a colonial shipping office, gazing at his typewriter. But The Atlantic upstages this narrative by suspending a dark ovoid shape with curling horns above the title and author information, its square eye sockets emptying out onto a yellow block of color on the page behind it. It is a photograph of an Ogoni mask, and it is credited to Eliot Elisofon’s 1958 book The Sculpture of Africa. In fact, photographs from Elisofon’s book hang above all the fiction and poetry published in this issue of The Atlantic. This photograph does not, it almost goes without saying, illustrate Achebe’s story, in which no mask explicitly appears, or the ethnic background of the author, which is Igbo. The connection appears to be purely visual: the mask is egg-shaped. Elisofon’s photographs of African art appeared on the pages of American magazines throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, and as these photographs circulated in the mass media they illustrated two different histories. First, they were intended to enhance American understanding of the African continent, its history, and its peoples during the era of decolonization. But because Elisofon also reanimated early-twentieth-century ideas of modernist primitivism, his photographs simultaneously illustrated modernism’s midcentury institutionalization in the United States. Understanding Elisofon’s photographs in this period thus requires historicizing them on the news-driven pages of LIFE, The Atlantic, and THINK (IBM’s in-house magazine). As Serge Guilbaut has memorably put it, New York stole the idea of modern art from Paris in this period, and Eliosofon’s photographs of African art were part of this appropriation: against the backdrop of African decolonization, they reenacted modernist primitivism for American consumption in the mass media. As a result, though they appear to be very much of their midcentury time period, Elisofon’s photographs in fact counteract the progressive temporality underlying American reporting on the emergence of new, independent nations in Africa and their relation to the ascendant global power of the United States. On the whole, then, this article is about tangled temporalities: there are multiple pasts in the midcentury present of Elisofon’s photographs; there is an inexorable sense of progress alongside clear evidence of stasis; there is repetition to the point of anachronism; yet there is very little of that form of temporality we call the future.

What do images have to do with the law? A lot, as it turns out. To make sense of an image requires the viewer to imagine a form of life. To imagine a form of life is to imagine a form of law. So law owes its existence to images; they clothe its abstract existence in sensible form. Think of the picture of sovereignty in the famous frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, the hallowed federalism of the Stars and Stripes, or Justitia, the anthropomorphic figure promising blind and equitable...

The articles gathered in this cluster will, I hope, provide the necessary spark to blow open the continuum of (settler) colonialist methodologies in modernist studies today. Extending the work of scholars such as Robert Allen Warrior, Christopher Teuton, Beth Piatote, Shari Huhndorf, Scott Richard Lyons, Philip Deloria, Daniel Heath Justice, Sean Teuton, Jodi Byrd, Lisa Brooks, Jace Weaver, and others, they challenge the unthought settlement upon which modernist studies has been revolutionizing itself for decades now. Together, they constitute an ethical demand that mainstream modernist studies scholars revise how we work. As they make plain, it’s time to face up to modernity’s—and thus modernism’s—ineluctable relationship to settler coloniality.

By the time I moved to Cairo to research Forster’s years in Egypt, late in the summer of 2018, I was already familiar with his cabinet of lost artifacts and vanished statues.