Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

This essay argues that Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (1967), usually considered a treatise on gender, can also be read as a theory of mind. The SCUM Manifesto has become a well-regarded and widely circulated text in anglophone feminist literatures. Now mostly an object of veneration, it is not gnawing away at the world with the intensity that Solanas wished for. Returning to Solanas’s corrosive ambitions for the manifesto, I will read for what might still be disruptive about Solanas’s text: How are the conventions of feminist scholarship and politics razed by this incendiary document? Solanas’s interest in, and facility with, psychological states is significant for two reasons. First, her writing introduces the problem of minded states that are violent and destructive (an internal, interminable negativity) to feminist literatures that often default to rationalist or benignly cognitive configurations of mind. Second, the clear differences between her writings and those of the liberal and radical feminisms that were emerging around her in the US in the 1960s and 1970s reveal how uninterested those feminists were in engaging with the vicissitudes of mentalization. Reading for mindedness in Solanas will make it impossible to think of the SCUM Manifesto as a feminist text and it will raise the possibility that many feminisms find their footing conceptually and politically by manifesting a lack of interest in the minds of others beyond what can be ascertained consciously or behaviorally.

This article uses the 1976 proof of the four-color theorem—the first instance of a major mathematical problem to be solved with the assistance of a computer—as a lens through which to explore current debates in the digital humanities. Critics of computational text analysis often represent it as imposing an alien, quantitative, or mathematical methodology onto qualitative literary material; and yet, the computational proof of the four-color theorem has also been notoriously controversial amongst mathematicians, many of whom reject the very idea of computer-assisted proof. This article explores two overarching sets of questions that have fundamentally shaped the reception of computational methods in both fields—the first about whether arguments based on computational analysis meet the standards of proof we have come to expect in either mathematics or literary criticism; the second about the role of aesthetics in our assessment of an argument’s validity. Attending to the mathematical debates that emerged out of the four-color theorem can help humanities scholars better articulate concerns about the surveyability of computational evidence and the reliability of experimental as opposed to deductive methodologies, while also prompting us to take seriously the connection between the aesthetic and epistemic components of our arguments. Conversely, the study of history, philosophy, and aesthetics can help contextualize changing mathematical ideas about the nature of proof.

This article analyzes the reception of Naftali Bezem’s painting In the Courtyard of the Third Temple (1957), which memorializes the 1956 massacre of forty-nine Palestinian Israelis by border police in Kafr Qasim, a Palestinian village on the Israeli side of the Green Line. Despite the Israeli public’s horror at the massacre and subsequent cover-up, Bezem’s choice to represent Palestinians as victims of Israeli state violence rankled many. While In the Courtyard of the Third Temple opened a conversation about who belonged to the Israeli body politic, I argue that the painting and its reception equally revealed the limits to the political imaginary of Zionism, even in its most left-wing form, evidenced by the artist’s reliance on a citizenship framework for human rights. The atrocity of Kafr Qasim for Bezem, as well as many Israelis, was that the massacred individuals were Israeli citizens misrecognized as infiltrators (mistananim), a pernicious label attached to Palestinians exiled during the Nakba of 1948. As Palestinians became infiltrators, they were denaturalized, not only from the places where they were born but also from citizenship and its attendant human rights protections. Thus, the painting both acknowledges one horrific instance of violence against Palestinians while failing to grapple with the broader structural violence that separated and divided both Palestinians and normative discourses of human rights along the Green Line. In the context of Israel in the late fifties, In the Courtyard of the Third Temple arguably doubled the effect of misrecognition that it had intended to dispel through its attempts at memorialization.

This essay argues that Harriet Martineau’s “Historical Romance” of the Haitian Revolution, The Hour and the Man (1841), might help us think about the complex knot of anxieties and aspirations that come together for perpetrators—or, more often, for those who feel connected to or responsible for perpetrators—in the wake of atrocity. This is not an obvious approach to a text that has so consistently been read as unproblematically, even naively, optimistic about a post-abolition social order. The claim of this essay is that a tragic vision of ineradicable guilt complicates, but does not displace, that unrelentingly positive official through line. Further, it argues that this complexity might help us tease out certain impasses or contradictions in contemporary discussions today of how to achieve what Ta-Nehisi Coates has described as the “airing of family secrets [and] settling with old ghosts” necessary to heal “the American psyche.”

This article considers two postures, kneeling and leaping, in light of their poetic performance in British abolitionist texts. Poetic performance includes both mimetic descriptions of postures and their animation through figurative language, apostrophe in particular. The article begins with a discussion of kneeling as an iconic posture in the abolitionist imagination, before turning to third-person apostrophic addresses in poems that perform leaping postures commonly associated with tragic romance (the lovers’ leap) and reports on the transatlantic slave trade (leaping overboard). In light of the occasional nature of the verse under investigation, the article elaborates how such leaps shape poems uncommonly disengaged from any high Romantic sense of poetry’s power to create the world it describes—an affinity which has been the basis for much work on lyric apostrophe. Focusing on Mary Robinson’s “The Negro Girl,” the article theorizes poetic postures as expressions of intentionality and embodiment that include relational affects inextricable from the hierarchical, racializing processes of social ordering in the colonial era.

In the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), the novel’s unnamed narrator confesses to stealing electricity from Monopolated Light & Power. His effort is registered by the electric company’s “master meter,” a punning nod toward metrical formal mastery that signals, this essay argues, Ellison’s broad but thus far largely invisible investment in the history of modern anglophone poetics. From its opening reference to Edgar Allan Poe to its more coded allusions to Ezra Pound, the novel’s protagonist’s plight to be recognized within a racist white society is also a canny meditation on the blind spots of lyric theory as it developed in white academic spaces from Romanticism through the mid-twentieth century. More specifically, the novel’s animating conceit—that we effectively “overhear” its solitary narrator’s retrospectively meaningful musings—reprises, with a difference, the image of Romantic poesis that would prove foundational to theories of lyric reading across the nineteenth century and beyond. Reading Invisible Man against other aspects of Ellison’s life and work, I show that the novel sketches an alternative theory of the lyric, one in which questions of race and media are seen not as threats to its putative universality but as constitutive elements of the genre.