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.”

This excerpt is from a testimony recalled by an eyewitness, who claimed to have seen four Naxalites being killed in an ‘encounter’ by the police in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. It appears in the interim report of the Civil Rights Committee (an unofficial, voluntary committee set up to investigate several ‘encounter’ killings of Naxalite prisoners) released in 1977. The committee was comprised of prominent civil society figures, lawyers, activists and journalists. The report claimed that the police ‘encounters’ they investigated were, in fact, extra-judicial killings. This claim anticipated what is today widely recognised in the public sphere, namely, that ‘encounters’ by the police or armed forces are often staged. The report was submitted to the prime minister of India and released to the press. The opposition raised questions in parliament regarding the claims of the report and a judicial commission of inquiry under Justice V. Bhargava was set up by the Andhra Pradesh government to conduct public hearings on the alleged encounters of Naxalites during and after the Emergency.

The report was a result of a fact-finding investigation. Fact-finding investigations are the predominant mode of activism for civil liberties groups in India. In a typical fact-finding investigation, an inquiry team is established on a one-off basis. The team visits the scene or site of the case, ascertains facts, identifies those who are culpable and makes demands or recommendations.

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.

Background

The first legal code of modern Nepal, the Muluki Ain, promulgated in 1854 by Prime Minister Jung Bahadur Rana, systematized every aspect of Nepalese society, from criminal and religious law to the caste system and property rights, reinforcing existing social structures that benefitted the dominant caste-Hindu elites. Largely influenced by ancient Sanskrit treatises and Brahminical social ideas and practices, the Muluki Ain labeled Nepal's Tamang community, along with several other lower-caste and Indigenous groups, as masinya matwali (enslavable alcohol-drinker) and murmi-bhotiya (people from the border [P. Tamang 2018: 45–46]). This categorization further deteriorated their social status, legally sanctioning their oppression, domination, and strategic exclusion in Nepal. They were converted into mere slaves or bonded laborers and subjected to compulsory labor (rakam) and porterage (Holmberg and March 1999: 6). The Tamang community had to bear the terrible sense of loss of their caste status and remained identity-less almost a century because of the exploitative and exclusionary attitude of the Nepali state toward them. The Tamangs had to wait till 1932, nearly 80 years after the promulgation of the Muluki Ain, to get back their caste status and ethnic recognition. In this regard, A. Hofer (2004) reminds us, “A decree signed by King Tribhuvan and the then Rana Prime Minister Bhim Samser lays down that, instead of the hitherto employed designations Lama and Bhote, henceforth the designation Tamang may be used officially” (Hofer 2004: 125). Although this allowed the Tamangs the permission to write their surname – “Tamang” – and be recognized as an ethnic group with their distinct culture and history, it was only the beginning of a long struggle for equal rights (P. Tamang 2018: 55).