This chapter implicitly responds to other chapters’ examination of imperial ideologies of time as well as their insistence on alternative temporalities. It does so by addressing the meanings and lived experiences of empire and its waves of apocalypse from the point of view of early Native literary studies and contemporary Native literary studies. In this chapter, literary categories open up history and demand that we see and think about periodization itself. Through a brief survey of early and contemporary texts, the chapter introduces readers to early (North American) Native studies and contemporary US Native literary studies, showing how both these overlapping bodies of literature helps us to see and better understand empire and ongoing imperial formations.

This chapter characterizes the five central themes that emerged from and unite the contributions to this book. It clarifies how the contributors characterized a defining conundrum of Black poetry, traces its intellectual interventions and its communal sensibilites, identifies its innovative origins and emphasis on syncretism, and captures its artistic beauties. And it clarifies how the contributors characterize the growing influence of African American poets in determining the terms of literary value in US literary culture. It verifies the expertise by which these essays validate African American poetry as a distincitve tradition and as an aspect of a US national tradition which it both critiques and enhances.

This chapter identifies and locates the ethos of the Society of Umbra amidst the effervescent countercultural scenes of New York’s Lower East Side and, later, in the Bay Area. It engages with the various ways in which writers, artists, and poets of Umbra created multiethnic and multidisciplinary creative and performative scenes that brought together “schools” including the New York School, the Black Mountain Poets, and the Beat Generation, with African American poets exploring the best poetic and political possibilities the cross-fertilization of the Lower East Side scene allowed. Such a stance later expanded into vibrant collaborations with Chicano/a, Asian American, and Indigenous poets and performers, which helped in the formation of collectives and coalitions that asserted Third World internationalist politics of resistance in the Bay Area. This chapter argues that, as members of the Society of Umbra sought to define and outline the contours of “black” poetic praxes that anticipated the Black Arts Movement, they also cultivated relationships with various creative communities which affirmed the collaborative mindset central to the Umbra ethos.

How do poets participating in a Black poetry community navigate between collective purpose and creative individuality, with respect to both political and artistic goals? This chapter engages this and related questions, offering an account of Cave Canem as a resource and force within contemporary Black poetry – but not in an institutional history. My focus here is not the foundation that has been an engine of empowerment and an influential player in the world of twenty-first-century American literature, but rather the ongoing, dynamic gathering of writers that describes itself as “a home for Black poetry.” What can we learn by constructing an aesthetic history of this organization? This effort will lay the groundwork for future scholarship that can more thoroughly explore what Cave Canem demonstrates about the power of collective action and mutual support to change culture, as well as the gravitational pull of the culturally familiar.

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 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.