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 concluding chapter reiterates the main contributions of the book. Growth in most African countries has been characterised by a transformation from low-value agriculture to low-value services. As a result, structural transformation has remained largely elusive within Africa. Services has been the fastest-growing sector on the continent. Rwanda is unique among rapidly growing African countries in explicitly focusing on becoming a services hub. Using the case of Rwanda, this book shows that contemporary late development, which is more dependent on services, results in more transnational forms of dependence and political contestation than experienced in prior experiences of late development. The book ends with thoughts about the future of Rwanda. It argues that in the immediate short term, any instability will depend on what happens in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In the long term, Rwanda’s political stability depends not on the government’s capacity to contain domestic popular mobilisation alone but on the capacity of transnational coalitions of dissident elites and external actors capitalising on existing horizontal inequalities to challenge the Rwandan Patriotic Front rule.

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.

No sooner had the House of Gorkha under the Shah kings succeeded in conquering its neighboring principalities during the end of the eighteenth century than it followed the policy of distributing the newly acquired land as salary and reward among its bhardars, that is, royal members, military officers, priests, and local landlords beyond the Gorkha. This paved the way for the rise of an influential elite class of confederates responsible for collecting taxes from peasants and also for the economic gap between landlords and peasants across the nation known as Nepal in later years. On top of that, this elite class promoted their language, known as Khas-kura, and their version of the Hindu religion mainly through promulgating the Muluki Ain in 1854. With it, the ruling class hegemonized their social and moral values among the castes and communities of diverse historical and cultural origins. This research aims to examine the way the feudal characteristics of Nepal as a nation manifest in modern plays of the 1930s. The question it aims to address is: how did “land,” “language,” and “religion” become dominant forces in the plays of the period? For this, I have chosen two plays, Mukunda Indira and Sahanshila Sushila, written by Balkrishna Sama (1903–1981) and Bhimnidhi Tiwari (1911–1973), respectively, in the last years of the 1930s, the decade that also saw the first wave of political uprising that gradually set the ground for the 1950 democratic revolution.

Rise of the Elites/Indigenous

The formation of Nepal as a new nation mainly from the 1770s under the leadership of the Gorkha king Prithvi Narayan Shah (1723–1775) paved the way for the rise of the elite class of the Khas Arya ethno-linguistic group.

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.

Chapter 3 centres on case selection and methodological considerations. The discussion opens up with a brief analysis that details how the MENA is understudied from both a climate and gender representation perspective, before moving on to a discussion of why it is important to study representation and climate change in authoritarian settings, i.e., not only in the MENA, but broadly speaking. The discussion in the first part of the chapter also covers the status of the MENA as a so-called ‘climate change hot-spot’. A considerable section of the case selection rationale in chapter 3 is dedicated to the study of gender and climate change within the MENA, which illustrates how the MENA case aligns with studies elsewhere in the Global South, i.e., focusing on women at the micro level and their vulnerability. The final (second) part of the chapter goes into detail with the methodology after briefly outlining the approaches favoured in the extant academic literature, coving both qualitative and quantitative methods.

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.