This chapter characterizes The Sisterhood, a group of Black women writers who met in New York at least once a month for two years and who advocated for Black women at trade publishers such as Random House, at magazines such as Ms. and Essence, and eventually in academic departments as they moved their intellectual labor from political organizing in the 1960s and early 1970s to literary organizing in the late 1970s and then, after the 1980s, into colleges and universities. It traces how The Sisterhood’s collaborative labor shaped the reach, form, and content of African American poetry through a Black feminist poetics rooted in a both/and way of thinking and writing that insisted on the interdependence of political, literary, and academic spheres. They believed in literature as a tool for Black liberation. In works by poets such as Harryette Mullen, Erica Hunt, Mahogany Browne, Tara Betts, and Evie Shockley, each of these aspects of The Sisterhood’s poetic legacy remains visible in Black feminist poetry today.

Harlem’s sensuous poetics refers to an aesthetic sensibility that turned toward the possibilities of feeling, sense, and perception – the realm of the sensuous – to imagine new experiences of Black bodies and pleasure. Its poets drew from the maelstrom of urban life (nightlife in particular) to conjure new ways of inhabiting the body, new desires, and new ways of moving individually and collectively. They provided a new way to understand the role of Harlem as a space of illicit sexuality and self-expression in poetry. This chapter surveys this tradition, situating Harlem’s sensuous poetics in the context of representational challenges to the politics of respectability that shaped Black middle-class cultural norms in the era. It looks first to recurrent poetic tropes (such as the “dancing girl” and the “laughing boy”) that contested such politics. It then turns to the enunciation of a sensuous poetics within normative middle-class institutions such as women’s civic clubs and literary salons. In doing so, it argues that this tradition is less a set of formal principles than a way of being in the world that begins from the body’s sense perception and its felt response.

Following the Black Arts Movement, emerging Black cosmopolitan poets such as Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa published poetry that appeared to be quite different than poetry of the 1960s and 1970s. Both poets took pains in their writing to assert both racial affiliation and a world citizen identity. While early cosmopolitan theory struggled to accommodate race, more recent scholarship by Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo (Black cosmopolitanism) and Susan Koshy (minority cosmopolitanism) provides useful conceptual frames that explain why a contemporary Black poet might pursue a cosmopolitan poetic and show how it works in actual poems. Readings of selected poems across both poets’ œuvres demonstrate their deepening cosmopolitan sensibility over time, revealing how they position themselves and their work within a frame inclusive of both Black identity and a relatively privileged, global perspective. Having established the features of a Black cosmopolitan poetics in the work of two major poets of this generation, a question arises. Does the poetry of the current generation of Black poets, those following Komunyakaa and Dove, perhaps exhibit a post-cosmopolitan perspective?

This chapter starts from the proposition that both poetry and diaspora entail ways of configuring relationships between the general and the particular that may deviate from dominant philosophical tendencies. Without assuming a uniformly shared style or way of thinking, I argue for diaspora as the name of a common historical situation for people of African descent. Noting the concept’s emergence in the 1960s as an alternative to and continuation of older configurations of Pan-Africanism, the chapter then offers brief sketches of some key figures – Kamau Brathwaite, Dionne Brand, and M. NourbeSe Philip – and their relationships to language, gender, and politics.

A brief afterword considers the imperial moment in which the volume was prepared for production alongside the volume’s collectively told story about empire and American letters—a story that also points to some of the most exciting new directions in literary studies more broadly.

This chapter concentrates on the ways that writers improvised with the discourse of what Amy Kaplan first described as “manifest domesticity”—a discourse pressing domestic life in the US into the service of empire-building. Their improvisations are a courageous attempt to do nothing less than insert queer lives into the national narrative. Beginning with Walt Whitman’s antebellum fiction, the chapter takes readers all the way into the twentieth century, collating a wide range of writers (some canonical, others now obscure) who shared an interest in queer lives avant la lettre—before, that is, same-sex desire was codified and transformed into an identity rather than a behavior. What emerges astonishes the twenty-first–century’s commonsense of nineteenth-century America: a culture surprisingly open-minded about non-normative desires that is, in many ways, less restrictive than our own; models of domesticity that challenge, rather than reinforce, the rapacious elements of empire; gay sex published and, in some cases, canonized.

For poets Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, and Jayne Cortez, jazz indexes a series of paradoxes and contradictions beyond standard accounts of the music and, in turn, beyond standard accounts of jazz poetry. In Joans’s live collaboration with saxophonist Archie Shepp We Have Come Back, the multiple versions of Kaufman’s ‘War Memoir’, and Cortez’s ‘If the Drum Is a Woman’, jazz reveals contradictions of racial, gendered, and national belonging in the Black Arts Movement era. These poems do not simply imitate jazz rhythms, but conceive jazz as a social form, part of the raced, classed, and sexed negotiations of bohemian community. Jazz becomes a way of thinking about practices of listening, about the way that art and cultural practices encapsulate the values of overlapping communities, and about the way that such practices serve as contested terrain. Drawing both prosodic energy and symbolic strength from jazz, these are also poems about jazz, about the stakes of listening to, consuming, appropriating, and appreciating the music, and about its role in the complex politics of the eras of McCarthyism, decolonisation, and the renewed rise of Black art.

“Poetry can be a genre of history,” proclaimed Natasha Trethewey, underscoring the role of historical poetry as a repository of cultural memory commensurate with and even more reliable than traditional histories. This chapter traces this distinctive turn to history among African American poets that emerged in the twenty-first century and characterizes aspects of the cumulative impact this verse has had of revising the nation’s history. It exemplifies this impact by analyzing “A Postcard From Okemah” by Terrance Hayes, which addresses a 1911 lynching; Evie Shockley’s “dependences,” which questions the reputation of Thomas Jefferson by demonstrating the contradictions between his words and his actions; and how, in leadbelly, Tyehimba Jess frees Huddie Ledbetter from the shadow of folklorist John Lomax and prominently positions him in the annals of American music. He offers a portrait of a Huddie Ledbetter who had agency, who hired a lawyer and sued for proper compensation, and whose musical contributions stand alone. In these new public histories, Hayes, Shockley, and Jess offer hope for a more just future.

The story of American literature and empire is vast and complex, its boundaries as hard to draw and as continuously disputed as the historical borders of the US nation-state itself. Historians of US empire tend to periodize their field into three broad eras of imperial formation: (1) continental expansion under the aegis of Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century; (2) the emergence of overseas empire with the Spanish-American War in 1898, when the US first acquired formal territories abroad; and (3) and the rise to globalism after World War II, when US military policing in the interests of global capitalism created an empire of military bases around the world while rebranding US imperialism and neocolonialism as embodiments of democracy and freedom, in part through a series of “endless” wars spanning the Cold War through the post-9/11 War on Terror. But for literary scholars, this broad historical periodization of empire loses coherence in the face of literature’s persistent ability to reimagine history, to make counterfactual claims, to invent new worlds, to change the experience of time, and to speculate and counter-speculate about the grounds of reality.

This chapter focuses on Captain Harry Foster Dean, a Black sea captain who has been largely forgotten but belongs to a lineage of Black Americans active in African repatriation movements from at least the early nineteenth century onward. Dean’s entire life was driven by the spirit of what we may call maritime Pan-Africanism—a variant of Pan-Africanism built upon aspirations of maritime capability. This chapter reveals what Marcus Garvey’s more familiar program, symbolized by the Black Star Line, can tell us about Dean’s significance to both Black Oceanic studies and the study of empire.

This chapter traces the history and legacy of Furious Flower, conceived as a conference on Black poetry and poetics in 1994 and continuing to this day as an academic and cultural center housed at James Madison University. While such institutionality may find itself, at times, at odds with the most radical parts of the African American poetic tradition, it is nevertheless a fundamental way to establish historically marginalized writing in the literary consciousness of a nation. This chapter examines the shape and the substance of Furious Flower’s dedication to archival recording while also looking at the organization’s attempt to chart a poetic landscape for African American poetry after the Black Arts Movement, in an era that has seen explosive growth in the production of poetic work but, precisely due to that growth, is increasingly hard to describe as a unified “tradition.” The chapter identifies how, through its dedication to audiovisual material, Furious Flower has turned scores of deeply ephemeral events into something that can be experienced across time and space, repeatedly, for the sake of research, teaching, community-building, and history-telling.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, a writer with the last name “Du Bois” helped articulate the shifting contours and geographies of Pan African and Black anti-imperialist literature. This chapter charts the evolving understanding of Black anti-imperialism within evolving geopolitical conjunctures in W.E.B. Du Bois’s, Dark Princess; Shirley Graham Du Bois’s journal articles, short biographies, and political speeches; and David Graham Du Bois’s novel …And Bid Him Sing. This Du Bois genealogy exemplifies the shifting terrain of Pan-African literature and the politics of Black anti-imperialism in the era of Three Worlds. The chapter tracks the awakening of Black anti-imperialism in the context of global 1930s, the Third World terrain of the 1950s, and the African American Third World left of the 1960s and beyond.

How might we read Paul Laurence Dunbar as a poet of place and landscape? Dunbar wrote his poetry in an era where local color, regionalism, and realism were dominant forces in American literature, and his poetry engages in complex ways with these generic traditions. At the same time, Dunbar’s poetry, particularly his writing in non-dialect verse, is deeply influenced by his lifelong study of and engagement with British Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions, and the modes of environmental representation through apostrophe, lyric meditation, and balladic narrative central to these traditions. I read Dunbar’s explorations of place and landscape in dialogue with these intersecting influences, in and through which Dunbar develops a sustained reflection on struggle, displacement, violence, and unfreedom as the fundamental conditions of Black experience in the post-Reconstruction era United States. Less oriented by local specificity or realist detail, evocations of landscape and place in Dunbar’s work engender abstract and self-reflexive meditations on terrains of anti-Black violence and pain as well as sites of retreat and resilience in the face of these conditions.

In his final years, American society finally punished Bieral for his violence, embracing the principle of the rule of law. His dismissal from the customs office and attempted assassination of Port Surveyor Hans Beattie led to imprisonment. The chapter examines his trial, insanity defense, and eventual pardon, contextualizing his downfall within the rise of civil service reform. Bieral’s family tragedies and his son’s criminal career underscored the generational consequences of a violent life, but he remained a popular figure. His death in a veterans’ home and burial in a national cemetery mark a quiet end to a tumultuous life. The chapter reflects on the cultural legacy of Bieral’s persona and the societal ambivalence toward violent masculinity.

Settling in Boston’s North End, Bieral became a “fancy man” in the city’s brothels, embodying the violent masculinity of urban vice culture. His relationship with Mary Anne McAllister, culminating in her suspicious death, reveals the precarious lives of sex workers and the impunity of their male protectors. The chapter examines Boston’s tolerance for nonlethal violence and the legal leniency afforded to men like Bieral. His involvement in extortion, political intimidation, and brothel management illustrates the blurred lines between public service and criminal enterprise. Bieral’s rise in the underworld reflects the societal valorization of aggression and the limited protections for marginalized women.

This chapter explores Bieral’s ascent in Boston’s sporting world, particularly in boxing and gambling. As a pugilist and promoter, he gained notoriety and respect among working-class men, leveraging his physical prowess and entrepreneurial acumen. The narrative situates prizefighting within a broader culture of honor and individualism, where violence served as both entertainment and social currency. Bieral’s transition from fighter to promoter and casino operator marks his evolution into a figure of influence. The chapter underscores the role of sport in legitimizing urban masculinity and the economic structures that sustained vice industries, revealing how athletic fame often overlapped with criminality.