Abstract: The state of nature is a foundational concept for modern Western thought, influencing ideas about colonialism, secularization, and ecology. It is a fractured idea that shines a light on the contemporary culture wars, and continues to shape debates on human nature, political structures, and the legacy of the West.

Abstract: The Conclusion argues that the state of nature remains central to understanding the fractured condition of modern Western thought, particularly in the fields of colonialism, secularism, and ecology. It highlights the continuing relevance of the notion for interpreting the fragmented imaginaries of Western modernity.

In the Conclusion, I return to the relationship between Sturmy’s voyage and the other ships which crossed the seas in the late fifteenth century.

Abstract: This chapter understands modernity’s fragmented and contradictory secular modernities through the prism of the state of nature accounts of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. It offers a new taxonomy of the varieties of modern secularization in terms of deflationary, collateral, and psychologizing imaginaries.

Abstract: This chapter theorizes three “figures” – the theoretical gestures or patterns – of the state of nature: a flattening of complexity, a partition between natural and civil conditions, and a normalization one of the sides of the partition. It argues that these figures recur across Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau’s work, where they present en abyme characteristic patterns of Western modernity.

This chapter discusses the concept of the visual imaginary and the visualism apparent across all of Kenneth Slessor’s writing, including his war journalism and poetry. It argues that Slessor’s career as a film writer for the popular press is related to the visualism of his poetry and to the history of cinema in Australia. The chapter analyses the relation between the light effects in Slessor’s poetry and the existential state of the poet, including in the elegiac ‘Five Bells’. It concludes with a discussion on the relation between Slessor’s war despatches about World War II in North Africa and the elegy for the casualties of war.

While early twentieth-century Western European and North American modernism has been characterized as a shock, its reverberations pulled the effects of the past variously in the wake of the new, depending on one’s circumstances in global modernity. This chapter discusses how, in that rupture/transition, the passages of Elizabeth Bowen, Pauline Smith, Dorothy Livesay, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Rhys into and out of British imperial metropole London in the “Mother Country” (England), reveal their self-conscious adaptations of modernist technologies, undoing some imperial trappings and redoing prevailing imperial-patriarchal structures of value and status to which they claim membership. Each woman conveys the effects of empire–democracy, while struggling to retain belief in the liberal humanist subject/author captured in the figure of the “New Woman.” “Technology” refers to both the material infrastructure of modernity (mass reproduction, invention, and innovation) as well as “teks,” the fabric woven to convey the intangible but felt experiences of being in empire. The chapter unpacks the different implications of the gendered, racialized, and classed discourses of modernity in the nation-state – mastering, producing, doing – for these writers, who were positioned unequally to each other and who interpreted socialist, feminist, and anticolonialist movements differentially.

Grounded by close attention to literary renderings of Algeria’s national epic, this chapter examines the historical entanglement of novelistic and nationalist projects in the wake of the decolonizing movements that founded independent nation-states across the African continent in the mid twentieth century. It begins by reconsidering Frantz Fanon’s diagnostic phenomenology of postcolonial nationalisms across and beyond the continent, articulated in two essays concerning national consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), alongside the novelistic experimentation of Kateb Yacine. To further explore some implications of Fanon’s claim that revolution is above all an aesthetic project, the chapter unfolds by surveying texts by Assia Djebar, Yamina Mechakra, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Mahmoudan Hawad to elucidate the ways in which African writers have theorized, anticipated, eluded, and unsettled both nationalist narrative imperatives and Eurocentric interpretive protocols concerning this paradigmatic literary form of modernity.

This chapter explores how African intellectual knowledge systems have been shaped by the cultural interchange between the African continent and the African diaspora in the Americas. In particular, I explore how notions of Africa and Pan-African thought have both shaped and been shaped by thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. This chapter attempts to trace a series of connections through a sampling of anglophone poetry, plays, letters, novels, speeches, music, and the ideas these texts embody in creating an alternative archive to that established by European thinkers. By focusing on the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the Drum Generation, political icons like Nkrumah, Garvey, Fanon, and Mandela, with odd pairings like Mugabe and Marley and a sampling of West African plays, I trace how the African diaspora shifted understandings of an imagined community on the African continent, while African thinkers changed how its diaspora understood the continent itself in terms of those imaginings. I am arguing for a vision of twentieth- and twenty-first-century African literary production as a repository of cultural strategies with material effects, which centralize how Pan-Africanisms imagine modernity.

Newspapers were essential to African engagements with the problem of colonial modernity in South Africa. This chapter focuses on Tiyo Soga’s writings in Indaba and how they inflected the discourse of the nation with an assemblage of African experiences. Nontsizi Mgqwetho’s praise poems in Umteleli are also considered for the way they combined publicness with an emphasis on the ethical bonds tying the (female) poet to the utterance of truth. The chapter highlights the connections between print, gender and the preservation of the conscience and memory of the people.

This chapter turns from the question of the Gospels’ literary form to that of their literary formation. According to David Strauss, no preceding understanding of the Gospels shared closer proximity to the emerging “mythical point of view” than “ancient allegorical interpretation” – an astonishing claim left unexamined since his Life of Jesus was first published. Strauss’s comparison of the mythical and allegorical views cuts closer to the heart of Origen’s sense of the figurative nature of the Gospels than any other account of early criticism of the Gospels. Nevertheless, I challenge Strauss’s final charge of unrestrained interpretive “arbitrariness” resulting from Origen’s view. I show instead that Origen locates the formation of the Gospel narratives in the Evangelists freely “making use” of the traditions they had received for their own purposes, freedom reflected in the distinctive (even discordant) characteristics of their narratives, which differ according to how the authors sought, “each in his own way,” to “teach what they had perceived in their own mind by way of figures.” Thus, for Origen, the Evangelists themselves were “figurative readers” of the life of Jesus.

Origen’s surprising presence within David F. Strauss’s genealogy of the critical examination of the life of Jesus ought to stir contemporary readers from slipping into their own forms of presumption regarding when, exactly, reading of the Gospels first became critical or what the term “critical” even means. Strauss’s presentation also underscores the difficulty of fashioning a portrait adequate to such a unique figure and introduces the need to retrieve Origen’s own first principles of Gospel reading. Here, I lay the requisite groundwork for addressing Part I’s overarching question (“What is a Gospel?”) by showing that, for Origen, the term “Gospel,” strictly speaking, does not designate just any discourse bearing the early Christian proclamation, but rather one that does so under the form of narratives of the life of Jesus. The stage is thus set for the more pivotal – and tortuous – question: What kind of narratives are they?