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KEYWORDS: Robert Hayden, American literature, Black literature, historiography, Middle Passage, poetry, slave trade The Middle Passage is now the central metonym for life and death in US Black arts and cultural criticism. It was not always so. In the mid-twentieth century, after long being overlooked, the Middle Passage was brought back into public consciousness by academic slave trade studies. Writers turned to this scholarship, I argue, to confront over determined intraracial tensions that arose in the post-civil rights era, transforming the ship's hold into an image of solidarity. To trace this transformation, I analyze poems by Robert Hayden, Primus St. John, and Nathaniel Mackey. Hayden's \"Middle Passage,\" the canonical literary imagining of the event, in fact reveals deep divergences from later Middle Passage poems, stemming from the altered social situation of their composition.

Tolle examines Muhammad Asad's Road to Mecca. Asad's narrative constructs a new masculinity to banish the specter of Jewish femininity. His philosophical journey is also and no less a gendered one. Road uses the frame narrative of a desert trek to Mecca in 1932 to detail, in flashbacks, his transformation from an Austrian Jewish, would-be bohemian intellectual to a Muslim-convert Middle East reporter and confidant of the Saudi royal family. Strong sales and warm critical reception notwithstanding, the book is now hard to find on Anglophone bookshelves, while in the Islamic world Asad's works remain bestsellers. Although critical studies and appreciations have appeared, much remains to be said about this singular figure in recent comparative religious history.