This chapter focuses on the women who pioneered Black Power poetry recordings alongside the male artists whose work dominates critical discussions about the genre. Beginning with Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks’s contributions to Folkways’ Anthology of Negro Poetry (1954), the chapter explores the rapid growth of the genre in the late 1960s and early 1970s, examining the work of Maya Angelou, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Laini Mataka (formerly Wanda Robinson), Sarah Webster Fabio, and Jayne Cortez. Their records represent women in control: as the leaders of bands, as publishers and producers, and as owners of record labels. Drawing on the inspiration of black music and musicians to infuse popular and avant-garde dimensions into their performances, these recordings catalyze personal and social transformation. Such multifaceted performances of blackness were carried out in the articulation of a dissident black femininity within and against a vigorously ambivalent commercialization.

This chapter analyses the political economy of Rwanda’s financial sector. It presents the evolution of Rwanda’s national banking sector and the ways the Rwandan Patriotic Front has sought to mobilise domestic resources to invest in strategic sectors. It provides an overview of how African financial sectors have been transformed in varied ways through adapting to three kinds of financial sector reforms: policies influenced by the market-led consensus, developmentalist strategies and the influence of offshore sectors. Rwanda, in its attempt to transform Kigali into a financial sector while mobilising state-driven investments for strategic investments and adopting ‘best practice’ financial sector reforms, encapsulates the contradictions associated with being influenced by these three sets of policies concurrently. Next, the chapter describes how the Rwandan government has innovatively mobilised domestic resources to fund strategic investments. Innovations include its pension fund, the Rwanda Social Security Board. The chapter concludes by discussing how elite vulnerability has constrained the capacity of the Rwandan government to concentrate resources and financial expertise in one specific financial institution, thereby inhibiting the effectiveness of strategic investments.

The sonnet has been in wide use among African American poets since the late nineteenth century. This chapter traces the African American sonnet from its emergence through the Harlem Renaissance in order to understand the popularity of a form often associated with white European literature. It shows that the sonnet initially was a means for Black writers to get published in the genteel quality magazines which shaped literary and political debates around the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, the sonnet served as a vehicle for community building and as a forum in which foundational questions of Black poetics could be negotiated. Discussing writers from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, the chapter identifies four impulses that guided African American approaches to the sonnet form: the contests over the commemoration of the Civil War; the subversive appropriation of genteel poetic conventions; the self-confident political protest of the Harlem Renaissance; and the quest for a vernacular modernist idiom.

The mid 1960s and early 1970s Black Arts Movement (BAM) was an artistic and cultural renaissance rooted in the desire to mobilize an aesthetic tied to black self-determination. Like the multidirectional flow of this regional, national, and transnational movement (east, west, north, and south), the lines of the poetry were moving in many unexpected directions. BAM poets were committed to representing blackness, but the impulse to represent blackness often became inseparable from the impulse to experiment with new ways of representing blackness. The movement set in motion a deeper understanding of the inseparability of forms of black representation and forms of black experimental space. With a particular focus on the BAM in the South and black women poets who developed a southern Black Power feminist orientation, this chapter examines the subtleties and nuances of the poetics of space that shaped the BAM.

This chapter takes a postcolonial-ecocritical perspective on a particular mode of empire referred to as ecological-agrarian imperialism. It examines aesthetic articulations of colonial agrarianism with a special view to James Fenimore Cooper’s Littlepage trilogy and The Crater, which are read in the context of Indian Removal and the Anti-Rent conflict in the Hudson River area. It argues that Cooper registers a remarkable critical awareness of the historical origins of the sociocultural conjunctions of soil depletion, food scarcity, biodiversity reduction, and colonial capitalism. Cooper’s works can help us think through the interrelated ecological challenges of our own time such as climate change, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss, and to reflect on utopian possibilities and roads not taken when the social and economic foundations of the United States were laid out.

This chapter describes the evolution of agriculture sector policies during the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rule. Most Rwandans still live in rural areas, and agriculture continues to employ most Rwandans. Prior to RPF rule, the Grégoire Kayibanda and Juvénal Habyarimana governments presented their parties as prioritising rural interests, as well as the production of cash crops for export (particularly coffee). However, since the RPF assumed power, policy priorities have shifted to diversifying agriculture exports (including producing higher-value coffee and tea) and encouraging the market-oriented commercialisation of agricultural production. The RPF’s attempts at reorganising rural society has been characterised by rural resistance and increasing inequality. However, there have been some successes, which have been driven by RPF-affiliated firms, sometimes in partnership with philanthropic investors. Successes include upgrading primary commodities and diversifying agricultural exports. However, agrarian policies have also been marked by increased land differentiation and rural inequality. Ultimately, sustained structural transformation is inhibited by elite vulnerability. The chapter highlights that there are few signs of the emergence of leading domestic agrarian capitalists.

Race has been a dominant theme in studies of US black art and politics in the 1910s and 1920s. This chapter shifts focus to imperial concerns during a period marked by US occupations in Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, as well as the acquisition of the Danish Virgin Islands. It explores how the era’s print culture both revealed and obscured the expansion of a US Empire or Greater United States in the Caribbean. US governance in places like Haiti did not go unchallenged in leftist and race-conscious periodicals such as The Nation, The Crisis, and The Crusader. While non-fiction provoked anti-imperial analyses, fiction did not prompt the same responses. Assessing reviews and commentary of fiction, including Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem and Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death, this chapter examines why anti-imperial reading proved so elusive in this context.

Melville is one of the canonical writers without whom a literary history of empire could not be imagined. This chapter contextualizes Melville as a continental thinker and, from this comparative perspective, reconsiders his insights on empire with an eye to Spanish imperial history, US empire, British empire, and the overlap among them. The chapter concludes with a turn to José Martí, another intellectual-activist without whom the story of empire in the Americas could not be told.

Although children have migrated as long as people have, the child migrant story has received increasing attention in the United States since the “child migrant crisis” of 2014. At the same time that child migrants have been thrust into the media spotlight, a growing body of work in migration studies has emphasized necropolitics. As enduring symbols of vitality in literature and culture, children are supposed to be the antithesis of death. Focusing on descriptions of nine-year-old Javiercito/Chepito’s body and language in Javier Zamora’s 2022 memoir Solito, this chapter shows that efforts to contain the unaccompanied child migrant physically, temporally, and linguistically call attention to the necropolitics of migration, undocutime (the slow violence of illegality), and the coloniality of migration in the Americas—in particular, the United States’ expansion of its southern border and the role of youth in its extractive relationship to Latin America.

Now twenty-five years into the twenty-first century, the formidable legacies of Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) come into clear view. She lent her lyrical voice to celebrating the dignity, complexity, and heroism of ordinary people. Her portraits of the residents of Chicago’s South Side, where she lived most of her life, achieve vitality because of her skillful fusion of Black cultural tradition with modernist aesthetics. She saw her poetry chronicling the history of a transforming society in the service of truth and universal humanism. Brooks wanted her poetry “to vivify the universal fact,” and early in her writing career she found that humanism all around her as she looked from the window of her small second-floor apartment at 623 East 63rd Street. This chapter discusses Brooks as the singular inspiration for the inaugural Furious Flower Conference in 1994, her passion for inspiring young people to explore their gifts of writing and reading, her own distinguished career as an award-winning American poet, and her deep devotion to the craft of writing and the inventiveness of language.

The essay considers the relationship of the US empire to torture as a practice and an aspect of entertainment. Focusing on depictions of torture in film and television after 9/11, the article also looks back to the nineteenth century to show how torture functioned as a type of entertainment in an earlier historical context. Lazo argues that the use of torture in popular culture amounts to a type of “torturetainment” meant to entice the audience with its spectacle of violence. Through these forms of torturetainment, US cultural producers recognize, critique and flaunt the US willingness to use torture as a tactic to support its imperial ambitions while also masking the operations of empire through a focus on alternate narratives related to the goals of protagonists. These cultural representations thus reveal torture as part of the arsenal of empire and a discursive framing related to social conditions within a national polis. The chapter examines the film Zero, Dark Thirty (2012) and a dime novel from 1851 to emphasize the longue durée of torture as entertainment within the context of the US empire.

Linking worldview and geographical spaces, this chapter links place, aesthetic development, and ideological changes in the work of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. From the mix of fantasy, sci-fi, bebop, and rhythm & blues of his home town, Newark, through his years in the (largely) white, avant-garde culture of Greenwich Village and his transitional plunge into Harlem’s Cultural Nationalist milieu, to his long final activism as Newark’s pre-eminent Marxist-Leninist poet, Baraka became one of the most controversial figures of the twentieth century. Throughout these changes, Baraka’s poetry, with its evolving combination of Black vernacular speech, avant-garde technique, and political acuity, profoundly influenced Black American poetry and, in the process, the nature of contemporary American poetry itself.

This chapter establishes the spirituals as the bedrock of African American poetry to characterize the tradition as inherently innovative from its origins to the present. It challenges the standard claim that African American poetry begins with texts written by enslaved persons reflecting familiarity with canonical British poetry. In this approach, criticism has generally considered African American poetry in dialogue with the mainstream canon, whether emulating or criticizing its values. Privileging written texts in conventional forms has resulted in devaluing poetry reflecting characteristics such as orality, performance, anonymity, and communal collaboration. It also results in wide acceptance of an African American poetry canon that historically has overlooked the innovative nature of this genre from its origins and an ensuing tradition of avant-garde poetry. From this biased perspective, the spirituals have been overlooked as the genesis of African American poetry, even though that is their rightful place. Viewing the spirituals as the true foundation of this tradition implies shifting some assumptions not just about these poems, but about the place and meaning of originality.

This chapter investigates how Charles Hérard-Dumesle’s 1824 Voyage dans le Nord de Haïti contributes to early Haitian writers’ production of Haitian sovereignty. Hérard-Dumesle contributes to this larger effort by contesting the imperial genre of natural history that instrumentalized Haitian people and nature. Against the imperial natural histories that justified colonial extractivism, Hérard-Dumesle offers a Haitian mode of natural history that weaves together the real and imagined natural cosmologies of the Taino people, rural Haitian small holders, and Haiti’s postcolonial elite. This expressly political Haitian natural history and the poetic eloquence on which it ran aspired to redress tyranny not only for Haiti but also on a planetary register.