Early modern European imperialism in the Americas is distinctive in the broader history of empires in its fusion of economic interests and geopolitical rivalries with religious objectives and rationales, despite sectarian divides. Taking a comparative hemispheric perspective, this chapter provides an overview of the imperial contexts in which colonial literatures emerged in the Spanish, Portuguese, British, and French empires in the Americas and describes the development of the various colonial literary and generic landscapes in these realms in terms of their diverse modes of economic exploitation and political domination within an emergent global capitalist system.

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.

Revolutionary theories were paradigms for transforming future modes of production, social relation, and cultural representation, and for assessing past and existing relations of inequality and unfreedom. In this light, revolutionary theory was its own form of speculative fiction. Contemporary speculative fiction and film by Indigenous and Latinx creatives is a continuation of this revolutionary theorizing. If 20th-century revolutionary movements “failed” Latin American, Latinx, and Indigenous subalterns, then speculative fiction responds to this failure with a 21st-century anti-colonial/decolonial hermeneutic for understanding social relations of power as legacies of colonialism, while the aesthetic conventions of speculative fiction reanimate the genre as a vision of future worlds. Latinx and Indigenous authors and directors of science fiction, neo-gothic, adventure and dystopic/utopic genres explore the legacies of colonialism, neocolonialism, dispossession, and extractivism by creating shared public visions for their audiences of these events, as well as visions of future worlds yet to come.

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.