This dissertation analyzes the idiosyncratic and ambivalent ways Black writers in the United States and French Empire perceived Nazism, up close and at a distance, from 1936 to 1940. This period reveals the pervasive sense among Black writers, artists, and militants that German fascism was entangled with the colonialism and racialization experienced in the liberal empires. While significant scholarship, primarily in the fields of memory studies, French studies and German studies, has uncovered seminal intersections and continuities linking the Holocaust and colonialism—both in the terms of empirical historical research and collective memory—this dissertation expands the comparative archive to include Black writers who elaborated comparisons in real-time and without rear-view knowledge of the Holocaust as a bounded historical atrocity. In doing so, it excavates comparative schemas that are outside dominant frameworks and require a nondeterministic approach, which I term “demonic grounds of comparison.” If the conventional ground of comparison classifies and organizes white supremacy and Nazism, Blacks and Jews, into neat comparative taxonomies of measure and equivalence, demonic grounds of comparison blaspheme against such comparative pieties by destabilizing commensurability and “providing avenues for the conjuring of alternate possibilities” indifferent to the governing alignments of victims, perpetrators, and their attendant ‘racisms.’

The first chapter focuses on the columns written by Du Bois for the Pittsburgh Courier while spending four months in the Third Reich in 1936. This correspondence, in its form as serialized columns, produced neither a definitive nor discrete analysis but offered an ambivalent and mercurial elaboration of comparison across time, marked by unsettlement, incoherence, and contingency. By reading serial columns, this chapter moves away from unearthing a delimited comparative perspective that ostensibly coheres and toward a structure of comparison that is disintegrated and contradictory, assembling and disassembling different vantage points across space and time and retreating from the comforts of analogical orthodoxies. Du Bois’s unsettlement of comparison is an inventive mode, generating multiple, relational strategies for conceptualizing the roles of economics and race in fascism’s rise—and thus relating multiples regimes of race—while at the same time marking that which exceeds generalized analogies between anti-Blackness and antisemitism.

The next chapter shifts from an analysis of an unfolding series of texts to one discrete text: the “the manifesto of the negritude movement,” L�on-Gontran Damas’s 1938 poetry collection Pigments. With close readings of two of the poems in the collection—“Save Our Souls” and “Nuit Blanche”—alongside contemporaneous writing from Suzanne C�saire, C. L. R. James, and, especially, Hannah Arendt, I argue that Pigments’ negritude critique of Black assimilation isolates precise historical resemblances and adjacencies between francophone Blacks and germanophone Jews, and between the Third Republic and the Third Reich. These in turn evince analogous breakdowns of imperial inclusion and expose the filiative ground of race-making on which the supposedly adversarial Third Republic and Third Reich are correlated. Both poems mobilized the overlapping, synchronic context of the Third Reich and its persecution of German Jews, tracing the adjacencies linking negritude strategies of class betrayal and European Jewish politics of assimilation.

The final two chapters unearth a method of periscopic comparison, an approach that activates a novel’s paratexts in order to represent its synchronic, international relationalities. It does so, however, without smoothening the novelistic and paratextual viewpoints into a coherent whole or plane of equivalence—on which the US and the Third Reich, and Blacks and Jews, would relate to each other as discrete, given unities. Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) was a naturalist proletarian novel that magnified the environmental formation and psychic tension of Bigger Thomas, a young Black man in Depression-era Chicago’s Black Belt. However, in private correspondence, lectures, pamphlets, and public responses, Wright chased the novel’s interpretation, curving away from the novel’s claustrophobic focalization by asserting the international framework of the novel’s relevance. The first chapter of this section focuses primarily on the slanted, paratextual lines of connection Wright traced from Bigger to German fascists, which maneuver around the novel’s focalization to coordinate multiple scales and registers of material and psychic dispossession across what Wright described as a vast “commodity-profit machine.” The coordination of these scales and registers circuited the Communist Party’s blindness to the Black lumpenproletariat in the interwar United States through its synchronic failure to prevent the rise of fascism in Germany.

The final chapter asks what periscopic comparisons Wright’s paratexts make to oppressed Jews. Jewishness appears submerged and peripheral in the novel, and sometimes it is present in the absence of Jews themselves. And manuscript drafts of the novel alongside archived writing notes reveal a curious textual process in which the Jewishness of characters was effaced. However, what is submerged and peripheral in the novel’s microscopic focalization becomes visible and suggestive in the paratexts, producing a critical tension between Bigger’s local relations with white Jewish Chicagoans and his international identification with Jewish Biggers. The novel’s acutely local focalization thus submerges Jewishness in whiteness while its paratexts pivot to uncover particular Jewish Biggers in the field of international multiplication. In doing so, Wright exposed the scalar imbrication of white/Black and Aryan/Jew axes of racialization. The territorialization of race occurred simultaneously across local and international scales, coding anti-Black and anti-Jewish racializing assemblages in overlapping and contradictory schemes that constantly organized and reorganized whiteness, Aryanness, Blackness, and Jewishness according to the shifting scale of relation or comparison.

This dissertation examines how twenty-first-century postcolonial fictions remake the liberal language of human rights to contest economic violence. A moral lingua franca for narrating violence and redress, human rights discourse typically deploys individual stories of suffering to evoke readerly empathy and galvanize ethical action. But its focus on the state as exclusive perpetrator and the self-possessed individual as the standard of personhood means it habitually misses economic violence—the structural denial from racialized subjects of rights to housing, healthcare, employment, education, food, and other tenets of material citizenship. By contrast, I argue that a growing group of contemporary postcolonial fictions—which I name “social rights novels”—helps us to rethink the relationship between human rights and economic violence. Included in this group are works by NoViolet Bulawayo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Imbolo Mbue, Ishmael Beah, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Jonathan Escoffery, Marlon James, and Edwidge Danticat. The genre exposes economic violence as a product of global racial capitalism and ongoing financial colonialism. It identifies and contests forms of predation overlooked by the dominant, rights-based imaginary—from the pollution and dispossession of Niger Delta communities by multinational oil companies, to the redirection of Caribbean state wealth toward international debt service and away from social welfare programming, to the marginalization of the economic refugee struggling to survive in the Global North. What holds the genre together across these diverse narrative sites is how it both marshals and destabilizes the language of human rights. To make this language usable, the social rights novel stretches it to a breaking point—something that postcolonial fiction has long done with colonial cultural materials. By breaking and remaking human rights in this way, the social rights novel builds a new narrative framework for imagining economic justice. Specifically, these works challenge the logic of neoliberal austerity, under which material provision is not a matter of rights but a market prerogative, a personal responsibility, or a problem for humanitarian charity.

Immunotherapy revolutionised oncology by harnessing the native immune system to effectively treat a wide variety of malignancies even at advanced stages. Off-target immune activation leads to immune-related adverse events affecting multiple organ systems, including the cardiovascular system. In this review, we discuss the current literature describing the epidemiology, mechanisms and proposed management of cardiotoxicities related to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs), chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies and bispecific T-cell engagers. ICIs are monoclonal antibody antagonists that block a co-inhibitory pathway used by tumour cells to evade a T cell-mediated immune response. ICI-associated cardiotoxicities include myocarditis, pericarditis, atherosclerosis, arrhythmias and vasculitis. ICI-associated myocarditis is the most recognised and potentially fatal cardiotoxicity with mortality approaching 50%. Recently, ICI-associated dysregulation of the atherosclerotic plaque immune response with prolonged use has been linked to early progression of atherosclerosis and myocardial infarction. Treatment strategies include immunosuppression with corticosteroids and supportive care. In CAR T-cell therapy, autologous T cells are genetically engineered to express receptors targeted to cancer cells. While stimulating an effective tumour response, they also elicit a profound immune reaction called cytokine release syndrome (CRS). High-grade CRS causes significant systemic abnormalities, including cardiovascular effects such as arrhythmias, haemodynamic compromise and cardiomyopathy. Treatment with interleukin-6 inhibitors and corticosteroids is associated with improved outcomes. The evidence shows that, although uncommon, immunotherapy-related cardiovascular toxicities confer significant risk of morbidity and mortality and benefit from rapid immunosuppressive treatment. As new immunotherapies are developed and adopted, it will be imperative to closely monitor for cardiotoxicity.

Immunotherapies have demonstrated robust clinical efficacy in treating malignancies with increasing use and FDA approvals. We review the epidemiology, risk factors, diagnosis, and treatment of immunotherapy-associated cardiovascular toxicities.

Cardiotoxicity is reported in patients receiving immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies. The incidence of ICI-related cardiotoxicity is above 1% and includes myocarditis, pericardial disease, arrhythmia, acute coronary syndrome, and vasculitis. The incidence of CAR T cell-associated cardiotoxicities was shown to be as high as 26% and thought to be primarily mediated by cytokine release syndrome. The presentations of cardiotoxicities are variable but are associated with significant morbidity and mortality and benefit from prompt initiation of immunosuppressive therapy. There is increasing evidence for cardiotoxicities following cancer immunotherapy. Available evidence suggests that pretreatment evaluation, close monitoring, and early intervention may reduce cardiovascular morbidity and improve outcomes in the cancer immunotherapy population.