In this chapter, I explore historical phenomena across a century of African American poetry, mapping a series of trends through which Black vernacular music and language come together in distinct poetic modes. Within this tradition, poets have consistently innovated the genre by incorporating culturally specific forms and expressive practices from the Black vernacular. While this conflation of music and writing has led to much innovation, it also carries immense political significance, by challenging the hegemony of Western aesthetic criteria and recording Black experience and cultural knowledge against racism’s denigrations or erasures. In this multiform articulation of Black subjectivity across time, African American poets have continually affirmed the importance of music as a cultural repository and a model for alternative poetics.

In order to characterize how African American poets enacted a version of the avant-garde, this chapter connects the formation of Black writers’ collectives in the 1980s and 1990s to the original theories of the avant-garde in which artistic dissent was tied to social withdrawal and political dissent. It identifies how the Dark Room Collective of the 1980s and early 1990s and the Black Took Collective of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century used their bohemian withdrawal to cultivate innovative artistic practices that led, paradoxically, to mainstream success. Since that success defies racial disparagement in ways analogous to how the collective withdrawal did, this chapter posits that "success" as an "avant-garde thing," an ambivalent extension of avant-garde dissent.

U.S. empire depends upon the logics of sexual normativity for their natural-seemingness. As an epistemological project, US empire shapes our understanding of what sexuality means. This chapter offers that the history of American literature and empire reveal how sexuality is inherently political, that desire is itself part of the political world; its contours are filtered through the relations of race and power that operate in the public sphere. There is a lot we don’t know about sexuality: it is too amorphous a collection of acts, desires, fantasies, and ideas to claim dominion over. What we know, however, is that US empire’s remapping of power relations, norms, identities, and territory operates with and through the desires we hold to be most intimate, and that American literary study is key to better understanding the sexual scope of empire’s reach.

This chapter identifies the intersection between the role of hip-hop music in literary poetry and the operation of poetics in rap by chronicling the parallel histories of the music and the poetic practices developed alongside and in response to it. It traces the emergence of rap from party music, identifies what constitutes poetics in the lyrics and the construction of the music, and clarifies how the music and literary poetry overlap in spoken word, in slam poetics, in TV shows like Def Poetry Jam, and in emerging academic programs and centers.

Starting in the late 1820s, African American poets began to write in concert with the abolition movement, and their work began to appear in anti-slavery periodicals. In these efforts, they translated the aesthetic theories of European Romanticism, and imagined Black consciousness beyond the confines of slavery and racism. Especially in the two decades before the Civil War, poets such as George Moses Horton, Ann Plato, Joseph Cephas Holly, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper undertook a wildly various range of formal experiments in the service of ending slavery and reconstructing Black cultural life. This chapter undertakes a survey of a number of the antebellum period’s Black poets, with the idea of thinking through the prophetic scope of their claims on history. It argues that in taking this posture, the Black Romantic poets anticipated more recent claims about the long-durational character of the Black radical tradition.

This chapter describes how dependence on coffee and other primary commodities exacerbated foreign dependency, especially during fluctuations in global primary commodity prices. The chapter discusses the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s (RPF) origins, including the key paradigmatic ideological foundations of the party while discussing the civil war and the 1994 genocide. The chapter ends by outlining three periods of the evolution of political settlement under RPF rule. Between 1994 and 2000, RPF loyalists were rewarded, while there was increased concentration of power among Tutsi RPF members. In the 2000s, until the early 2010s, RPF leadership centralised control among a smaller clique within the RPF, with increasing elite fragmentation characterising this period. In the third phase after the early 2010s, there has been increased external reliance, and the visible threat of transnational coalitions, comprising RPF dissidents and disenchanted domestic elites, has emerged but been contained.

This chapter traces how Langston Hughes (1901–1967) documented the Black experience in America from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movemen and some key legacies of the Black world building he pursued by engaging with social justice and political activism. To this end, the chapter details overlooked correspondence to reveal the mentoring Hughes provided to Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and Amiri Baraka. These letters illuminate the unmistakable confidence Hughes instilled in both Brooks and Walker while the often overamplified tension between Hughes and Baraka quietens into a spirit of working admiration among equals.

This chapter contributes to the relatively recent scholarly debate on African American ecopoetry, proposing that the history of Black ecopoetry in the United States is one of poetic engagement with the troubled entanglements of Blackness, the natural world, and notions of the human through the lens of Black ecological thinking. African American ecopoetic imagination is situated within the larger universe of Black ecologies, or ways of knowing and being in the world that synthesize vernacular traditions rooted in Black environmental experiences with the Black diasporic intellectual traditions of eco-humanism. In this chapter, I outline some of the calls and responses that shape the African American ecopoetic tradition by exploring how its shared common aesthetic and thematic elements – in particular, the mascon of the tree, strategic identification with the non-human, and concern with environmental justice – function in poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, Evie Shockley, Danez Smith, Ross Gay, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Camille Dungy, among others.

This chapter sketches some broad contours of Black periodical poetry from the years leading up to the Civil War until just before W. E. B. Du Bois founded The Crisis. It considers three illustrative poems published in Black periodicals: George Boyer Vashon’s 1865 “In the Cars,” Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s 1863 “The Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth,” and Mary E. Ashe Lee’s 1885 “Afmerica.” Recognizing that, for all of their differences, many Black periodicals had the shared goal of making larger and better discursive spaces for African Americans, it studies how poems such as the chapter’s examples enabled Black readers to see themselves in human modes denied by the white industrial publishing complex and to consider crucial questions of Black communities, history, and art. It argues that Black periodical poetry challenged the ephemerality associated with periodicals by creating print practices that were both of the moment and part of a much larger ongoing history; Black periodical poetry thus addressed past, present, and future and revised the idea of poetic “occasion” to intervene in America’s serial “changing same.”