This chapter considers how the mainstream success of contemporary African American poets recalls the concerns about public pressure to conform at the expense of expressing Black cultural heritage in verse that Langston Hughes explained well in his 1926 essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." Using interviews with the poets and analysis of their poems, the chapter traces the ambivalent reception these poets have perceived and articulates the senses of heritage and innovation by which they maintain their integrity. It concludes that, while Hughes’s concerns remain relevant, contemporary African American poets in the national spotlight have achieved their prominence through a well-earned confidence.

The topic of chapter 6 is unequal representation with particular emphasis on intersecting identities, voice and agency. The chapter digs deeper into the issue of policy priorities with a view to uncover who — and to some extent also what issues — female parliamentarians in the region represent as well as the reasoning behind their choices, not based on voting patterns as has traditionally been the case in such analyses, but anchored in personal narratives. The chapter accordingly explores the quality of representation (symbolic, descriptive and substantive) and helps us gain an understanding of which women and policy areas are represented, and which are underrepresented in politics at the national level, something which has very significant implications for not only climate change mitigation, but also adaptation and impacts. As the analysis progresses, it becomes clear that the female parliamentarians in the MENA tend to represent ‘people like me’, a reality which poses a serious problem for the quality of women’s representation, because the majority of women are simply not represented in earnest.

This chapter defines the key techniques of African American poetry invested in digital technology and internet community as "remix" and "sampling," and traces how these techniques derive from a pursuit of liberation that, it argues, has been at the heart of the African American poetic tradition since the first enslaved poets wrote. It identifes how Black digital poetics continues to challenges dominant narratives that diminish the Black body as commodity in the service of nationalist and colonizing practices. It demonstrates how digital poetics uses its techniques to imagine non-hierarchical ways of being and knowing.

This chapter outlines the more than century-long impact of the Left on African American poetry and vice versa from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Bolshevik Revolution in the early twentieth century to Black Lives Matter in the early twenty-first. This is an exchange with deep formal and thematic consequences for the development of Black poetry and a crucial mode for the circulation of Black Left ideas, practices, concerns, tropes, and so on, in US society, marking US politics and culture, and, to a significant degree, keeping the Left alive in the contemporary moment when the Left is more a sensibility and culture inspiring relatively loose and ephemeral association rather than consisting of stable and coherent parties and internationals.

As a country situated in the Himalayan belt, Nepal is prone to various natural disasters, from earthquakes and landslides to floods and famines. For Sabrina Regmi, who works on gender and disaster in rural Nepal, it is the unique topography of the country that makes it prone to disasters like landslides in the mountainous areas, floods in the lowlands, and earthquakes in the hills (Regmi 2016: 224). Indeed, who can forget the massive earthquake in 2015 that alarmed and alerted the world to the dangers of inhabiting this Himalayan zone. If these natural disasters that have led to Nepal being ranked 20th in the highly disasterprone zones of the world (Khanal 2020: 7) were not enough, then the country has had to contend with various man-made disasters in the form of the Maoist civil war that lasted for nearly a decade (1996–2006). Therefore, it is no surprise if disaster emerges as a major theme in contemporary fiction from Nepal, be it in Nepali or the English language. Nepali writers such as Maheshbikram Shah, winner of the Madan Puraskar, the highest literary honor in Nepal, and journalist, filmmaker, and writer Sushma Joshi, in her debut collection of English-language short stories, depict various natural and man-made disasters plaguing Nepali society. Sushma Joshi's English-language collection of short stories titled The End of the World (2008) contains stories about the plight of the urban poor within the city of Kathmandu. Maheshbikram Shah's collection titled Chapamar ko Choro (2006), which translates as “The Guerrilla's Son,” depicts narratives about the plight of ordinary people in rural Nepal, drawn from Shah's own experience of working as a police officer within the Nepali state. These short stories by Shah and Joshi depict different kinds of disasters, from floods, famines, and imagined apocalypse to war, while placing women at the center of these disintegrating worlds. This chapter aims to understand what placing women as central protagonists within a rapidly disintegrating world means.

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 her memoir, Ilina Sen reflects on the political currents that shaped a generation of civil liberties activists in the 1960s and 1970s, including her own journey and that of her partner, Binayak Sen. Both were members of the PUCL, having served as its office-bearers. She describes how Gandhian, democratic-socialist, and communist political traditions in India inspired a generation of young, urban thinkers and activists who sought to reimagine their role in public life. For some, this political commitment demanded a renunciation of middle-class comforts of city life, to move to and live in rural areas, immersing themselves in grassroots social movements and taking on leadership roles within emerging movements. For others, like the members of the PUCL, it meant channelling their energies from the urban centres, supporting various movements using available resources to sustain and amplify movements. Through this, a politics of allyship took shape, through creation of platforms that provided emerging movement groups visibility and voice.

As allies, civil liberties activists have often reflected on normative questions and searched for shared, general and internally consistent principles to act upon. G. Haragopal and K. Balagopal, both members of the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC), raised the questions in the above quote. Others like Smitu Kothari and Harsh Sethi asked similar questions of themselves and their fellow activists. They ask, for instance, ‘How are we to react to the violence that the “revolutionary” groups engage in—be it against the state apparatus, other revolutionary groups, or against a general mass of the population?’ (Kothari and Sethi 1989, 13). A second dilemma emerged from the state being both the ultimate appellate authority and the perpetrator. In the context of communal violence, where the government and the local administration might have been complicit, civil liberties groups wondered who the appropriate appellate authority should be. ‘When communal violence is at its fever pitch, do we have any instrumentality other than the state to appeal to?’ (Kothari and Sethi 1989, 14). As we can see, these questions have both a political dimension (that is, to do with strategy formulation) and an ethical one (that is, to do with developing a code of conduct for themselves). These debates helped allies understand and build their own identity. In this chapter, I analyse two recurring debates within and across civil liberties groups to understand how these debates shaped the organisational identity of ally groups.

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.

Chapter 4 is the first of the four analytical chapters anchored in the qualitative interviews, and focuses on the topic of women’s representation in the MENA at the national level. The chapter presents an overview of women in parliament from independence to the present day, covering the right to vote and stand for office as well as the number of female parliamentarians per country following the most recent elections. The analysis then moves onto barriers to women’s representation, beginning with the pre-nomination stage and the role of factors such as patriarchy and violence against women. The subsequent sections detail different paths to parliament in the pre- and post-Uprisings eras. Among the topics covered are internal party culture and electoral rules, as well as the background characteristics of the women who make it in politics. The final part of chapter 4 is dedicated to the factors behind success at the campaign stage and once in office with particular reference to the importance of extra-party networks, access to finances and qualifications, as well as the issues of discrimination and self-discrimination at the time of portfolio allocation.

Chapter 7 begins with a discussion of how colonialism and the climate issue in the MENA are strongly linked, and how this relationship affects not only development trajectories, but also the status of the climate as a policy area and women’s representation. The second part of the chapter covers Othering, that is, the portrayal of women as vulnerable victims or saviours, focusing on the dangers of feminizing vulnerability and responsibility, whilst also showcasing how Othering of women in the Global South occurs among female parliamentarians in the MENA. In terms of the global climate crisis, this has led to a situation where the climate issue is not prioritized as much as it could be if the female parliamentarians were more accountable to the electorate and identified more strongly with a broader group of women, that is, beyond the narrow elite segment of the population from which they themselves were recruited. At present, those that are the most passionate about combatting the climate crisis are the youth, whereas those who stand to gain the most are marginalized women — two groups that are nothing like the female parliamentarians, who are supposed to act in their interest.

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.