James Laughlin, who founded New Directions Press in 1936, had an early and enduring commitment to publishing innovative European authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Louis Ferdinand Céline, Hermann Hesse, García Lorca, Eugenio Montale, Vladimir Nabokov and Pablo Neruda. Laughlin’s international ambitions as a publisher extended to engaging with contemporary British writers and journal editors demonstrating a modernist dimension, evidenced in his extensive correspondence. This essay explores ways in which Laughlin furthered the New Direction Press publishing objectives within the post World War II English-language literary culture of Wales, including his interactions with Dylan Thomas, editors Keidrych Rhys and Gwyn Jones, and significant poets and fiction writers emerging in Wales during the 1940s. While Laughlin was informing Welsh writers and editors about New Directions Press authors and titles – and thus about manifestations of international modernism – Welsh writers and editors in turn educated Laughlin about the burgeoning English-language literary culture of Wales.

The eye is an unreadable transparency (a fact made viscerally evident by the opening shot of Beckett's Film, in which Buster Keaton's glaucous eye, occupying the entire screen, is at once obscenely exposed and wholly impenetrable). [ . . . ] Even the frequently open mouths in Caravaggio's work [ . . . ] are more frequently figured as a defensive cry against the world than as a readiness to be penetrated or invaded.

This article is based on a painting by Los Angeles-based Black artist Mark Bradford, On a Clear Day, I Can Usually See All the Way to Watts (2001), which was exhibited at SFMOMA in an installation that juxtaposed it to a series of drawings by abstract artist Agnes Martin, Untitled (Study for 'On a Clear Day'), <> (2019-2020). In an extended reading of abstraction and its social implications and of Bradford's engagement with abstract traditions, the article explores the material traces of impurity in his contemporary non-representative visual art. In particular, it focuses on hair as complex sign of impurity, concealment, animality, decay, aesthetic beauty, etc, and of the ways in which its incorporation, materially and metonymically, in the painting disturbs the clarity of the white aesthetic gaze. The article thus considers how the material practices of certain, broadly speaking, postcolonial artists, but in particular the Black Abstraction exemplified by Bradford's work, challenge the Kantian aesthetic tradition that has dominated the visual arts even in a post-Kantian artistic realm.

Extract The successive modernist moments that punctuate Irish literature, defined by their response to the colonial conditions of Ireland’s modernity, are no new thing, even if they always seems to take new forms and require new declarations. Modernism in Irish poetry, a quality inseparable from its precocious experience of the violent and disruptive impact of modernization and the inroads of colonialism, cannot be understood apart from that history. The Irish poet Trevor Joyce concluded an essay on “alternative poetries” in Ireland with the following remarks: The tug of [James] Joyce, Beckett, and other poets of the ’30s has been strong enough for us to feel free of all hegemonies, whether from Britain, America, Europe or elsewhere, and to confirm to us that writing in Ireland can be radically innovative and independent without privileging any external authorities. We seek from nowhere the franchise to regard ourselves as innovators, or to provide a living alternative to those tendencies we find most intimately oppressive.1

Nasser Hussain often attended to the relation between law and poetry and this article begins with a reading of his brief paper "Auden's Law like Love." In a famous essay, "Nomos and Narrative," Robert Cover linked the communication and the application of legal norms to narrative. This article presents an alternative, anti-normative, and anti-narrative, notion of the relation between poetry and justice that one might call "a-nomos and lyric." It argues that an alternative conception of "poetic justice" persists in the fundamental, paradoxical sociality of a poetic language that resists consumption and subsumption as it does coercion. In its very redundancy, in both the semantic and economic senses of the word, poetry renders to us an apprehension of what "justice" might be as opposed to law. Where law determines, decides, and pronounces sentence, justice opens the space of attentiveness that necessarily suspends the decision of the law. This idea of poetry unties the knotting of nomos to narrative as it stages the indeterminacy of the sentence and of the bounds of experience. Through its redundancy, condensation and proliferation of meaning through tropes, and its delay of the arrival of sense, poetry offers a different understanding of the relation of law and literature than arguments based on narrative can attain. It offers a model of justice beyond the law.

This chapter addresses the ambivalent relation of Irish Protestantism to settler identity in the post-1922 period. In the Republic, Irish Protestants accommodated to the new state and majority Catholic government; in Northern Ireland, “a Protestant state for a Protestant people” took on the forms of a settler-colonial state. Protestant supremacy expressed itself in triumphalist cultural forms and in legalized and informal discrimination against Catholics. Northern Ireland offers a “laboratory” for the formations of the settler colony that clarifies the tendencies of settler-colonial entities: the necessary supremacism or racism, the sectarianization of working-class allegiances, the disproportionately violent response of the state to the demand for rights, and the necessity for the withdrawal of “mother country” support for a peace process to begin. Northern Ireland highlights how settler mentalities are the effect of a structure of dominance, not an unchangeable given. Analogies with Palestine/Israel are frequently invoked and the Northern Irish peace process might suggest a just way to end Israel’s colonization of Palestine. Northern Ireland indicates that the entrenched structures of racial or ethnic supremacy in settler-colonial societies are not necessarily permanent or endemic, but capable of transformation if relations of domination are dismantled.

This essay argues that the niche occupied by contemporary Irish poetry in global Anglophone literature is a function of its formal conservatism and resistance to theoretical reflection. Irish poetry offers a moderate and palatable alternative to poetic work that works in a more thoroughgoing fashion through the violence of the present. Its conservative formalism is a hedge against confronting form with the conditions poetry must engage with. Accordingly, much of recent Irish poetry paradoxically furnishes a convenient and consumable commodity form even where it seems to offer an alternative to the economic and ecological spectacle of global transformations. But a number of poets have found formally innovative ways to accommodate both the political violence of the Troubles and the depredations of neoliberalism in Ireland while at the same time drawing on the long history of Irish resistance to such effects of colonialism and capitalism.

Spatial fragmentation is the fundamental condition of Palestinian life, whether under occupation, or under siege, or in the global dispersal that has been the fate of refugees, denied their right of return to historic Palestine. Palestinian artist Emily Jacir’s work inhabits this space and time of fragmentation, committed to the redemption of the fragments of violently broken histories. Working in the mode of assemblage and installation, she pieces together into constellations of memory and correspondences the overlooked objects and damaged archives that bear historical memory and future hope. This article explores this dialectic of fragmentation as a response to the conditions settler colonialism in Palestine that draw lines of solidarity with other sites of colonialism and resistance. The article focuses on her recent site-specific installation, ‘Notes for a Cannon’ (2016) at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, which explores the intervention of British and Israeli colonial regimes into temporality itself.

This essay addresses Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence” to draw out the implications of the paradox he notes, that an exercise of a right, if it calls into question the legitimacy of the legal order, can be perceived by the state as violent, even where it is, strictly speaking, nonviolent. Benjamin theorized this in relation to the general strike, which reveals “an objective contradiction in the legal situation” that is nonetheless fundamental to the problematic constitution-in-violence of the state itself. His meditation on the strike can be extended to boycott, divestment, and sanctions as nonviolent exercises of a right that are understood by the state as destructive acts of violence: they present a challenge to the legitimacy of the state precisely in their will to abolish a condition of exclusion and differential rights that is constitutive of the state. In this respect, the observation that BDS seeks “the destruction of the state of Israel” finds its rationale and its limit within the logic of the “Critique of Violence” but also points beyond the institutions of rights, states, and law.