James Baldwin is a thinker of the potential of “the individual” in disenchanted modernity. Drawing on work by Ashon T. Crawley, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others, the essay explores this claim by tracing the resonances between the museum scenes found in two of Baldwin's novels: one in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), where characters visit the Museum of Natural History, and the other in Another Country (1962), where they are dazzled by a work of abstract expressionism at the Museum of Modern Art. The echoes between the two scenes actualize Baldwin's suggestion that it is in aesthetic practices, whether within or outside the museum, that diasporic modernity's aborted potential can be resuscitated. In particular, at stake is the actualization of the self-generating diasporic subject, unbeholden, in protest or adaptation, to any preconceived schemas of white epistemology.

One particular effect to which Shakespeare puts the verbal rhythms in his sonnets is to generate a kind of prosodic unrest. To illustrate this effect, this essay first distinguishes and coordinates a set of six or seven forms of syllabic emphasis involved when a reader prepares to voice a sonnet aloud. This prosodic taxonomy allows readers to discern and appreciate a kind of tension Shakespeare generates in the syllables that make up his rhythmic verses, a prosodic tension that underscores the emotion depicted in many of the “dark lady” sonnets and in some of the more angst-ridden of the other sonnets, particularly those where he treats the injuries that the fair youth and he have suffered at each other's hands.

Climate-change discourse is suffused with a profound sense of loss, amid accelerating ecological degradation. While some ecocritics consider the elegy an apt means of narrativizing these losses, others call for genres capable of moving beyond mourning. I argue that the Bildungsroman—which typically depicts a protagonist who undergoes a transformational journey following crisis and eventually comes to terms with the world—may narrativize the process of moving beyond climate grief and adapting to a changed world. I indicate a corpus of novels that may be termed “climate Bildungsromane,” which envision various transformations following climate grief. Through an analysis of one significant example, Jenni Fagan's The Sunlight Pilgrims, I explore climate Bildungsromane's tendency to narrate the journey from ecocatastrophe to adaptation through a fusion of modern scientific rationality with forms of belief and storytelling commonly considered premodern. I contemplate how and why this seeming paradox surfaces across cultural imaginings of journeys beyond climate grief.

This article asks what might be learned about early modern and modern cultural practices of imagining the self by examining accounts of maritime travel and exploration that (in contrast to the lyric poems, novels, and paintings so often examined by histories of modern selfhood) are narrated in the first-person plural. I use a series of best-selling eighteenth-century British narratives, focusing on the 1748 account of George Anson's voyage, to consider this kind of collective narration. I then turn to William Cowper's 1799 poem “The Castaway” as an example of a text in a genre often imagined as paradigmatically focused on the individual—the lyric—that engages with the maritime narrative tradition and uses it to explore the possibilities of a more fluid and contingent sense of the self.

Decapitation has captivated artists and writers since antiquity and has been generously theorized, notably in a European framework. As a less analyzed trope of plantation fiction, decapitation conjures both the torture and the revenge of the enslaved. The French Caribbean literary tradition, emerging in the shadow of the French and the Haitian revolutions, is especially haunted by the severed head. Beyond the revolutionary context, decapitation represents crisis—a threat to the plantationocene. Victor Séjour's “Le mulâtre” (1837), Henri Micaux's De nègres et de békés (2011), and Raphaël Confiant's Bal masqué à Békéland (2013)—published more than 175 years after Séjour's short story—cohere in the castrative associations of (white paternal) decapitation. Maryse Condé's Célanire cou-coupé (2000), in contrast, stages a picaresque parody of this Freudian paradigm; this story of recapitation and female survival is fundamentally enabled by the nomadic novel's departure from the plantation and the overdetermined associations imposed by that chronotope.