1. On the roles of Caribbean migrant intellectuals in transforming Britain during the pre- and postwar period, see Bill Schwarz’s edited collection West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (2003); on CAM, see Anne Walmsley’s foundational The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972: A Literary & Cultural History (1992).

2. In addition to the sources mentioned previously, studies of British Black and Asian literature and culture between the early 2000s and the mid 2010s include Susheila Nasta’s Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (2002); James Proctor’s Dwelling Places: Postwar Black British Writing (2003); John McLeod’s Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (2004); Black British Writing, eds. R. Victoria Arana and Ramey (2004); A Black British Canon?, eds. Gail Low and Marion Wynne-Davies (2006); “Black” British Aesthetics Today, ed. R. Victoria Arana (2007); Peter Kalliney’s Cities of Affluence and Anger: A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness (2007); Dave Gunning’s Race and Antiracism in Black British and British South Asian Literature (2010); Graham MacPhee’s Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (2011); Tracy Prince’s Culture Wars in British Literature: Multiculturalism and National Identity (2012); Adhai Murdoch’s Creolizing the Metropole: Migrant Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film (2012); and Wendy Walter’s Archives of the Black Atlantic: Reading between Literature and History (2013).

3. To the best of my knowledge, the only other book-length study is Ian Andrew Dieffenthaller’s general overview, Snow on Sugarcane: The Evolution of West Indian Poetry in Britain (2009).

4. Overviews of Black British poetry in the postwar period include Omaar Hena’s “Multi-Ethnic British Poetries” in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2013); Jahan Ramazani’s “Poetry and the Translocal: Blackening Britain” in A Transnational Poetics (2009); Sarah Lawson Welsh, “Black British Poetry” in The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945–2010 (2015); Birgit Neumann’s “Liberationist Political Poetics” in The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature 1945–2010 (2016); Romana Huk’s “Genre Crossings: Rewriting ‘the Lyric’ in Innovative Black British Poetry,” also in The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature, 1945–2010; and Gemma Robinson’s “Postcolonial Poetry of Great Britain” in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry (2017).

5. For instance, see Robert Brenner’s The Economics of Global Turbulence (2006); David Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (2010); and Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (2016).

6. My argument on race, poetry, and crisis is akin to Malachi McIntosh’s notion of Black British poetry’s capacity to create “divisive narratives of Blackness as crisis always,” forms of crisis that poetry (for him) both “subtends and transcends,” although my own readings are perhaps more skeptical of poetry’s gestures towards transcendence. See McIntosh’s “Images of Transcendence: ‘Crisis Always’ and the New Black British Poets” (2023).

7. Some foundational sources on poetry, persona, and personhood include Robert C. Elliott’s The Literary Persona (1982); Shadi Bartsch’s The Mirror of the Self (2006); and Oren Izenburg’s Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (2011).

1. On these cases and the political activism challenging social injustice, see Here to Stay, Here to Fight: A Race Today Anthology, edited by Paul Field et al. (2019, 141–74).

2. On the police manipulation of statistics in reporting and shaping “Black crime,” see Cecil Gutzmore’s “Capital, ‘Black Youth,’ and Crime” (1983).

3. On David Oluwale’s life and tragic death, see Kester Aspden’s The Hounding of David Oluwale (2008) and Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners (2008). LKJ also wrote an elegy for Oluwale, “Night of the Head,” in Dread Beat and Blood.

4. Nathan Suhr-Sytsma has similarly tracked the various transformations of LKJ’s first poem in print, “Five Nights of Bleeding,” from its initial appearance in Race Today in June 1973 up through its publication in Mi Revalueshanary Fren with Penguin Modern Classics in 2002. See his essay “Publishing Postcolonial Poetry” in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry (2017).

5. Howe’s article is the third installment of a series that was later published in his book, From Bobby to Babylon: Blacks and the British Police (1988).

6. Howe’s descriptions are widely supported by the scholarship on policing in Britain during the 1970s. See Tony Bunyan, “The Police against the People” (1981/1982); Lee Bridges, “Policing the Urban Wasteland” (1983); and Out of Order? Policing Black People, edited by Ellis Cashmore and Eugene McLaughlin (1991).

7. There are several excellent sources on the 1981 Brixton Uprisings. See Simon Peplow’s Race and Riot in Thatcher’s Britain (2019); the Editor’s “Notes and Documents,” in Race and Class (1982); Michael Keith’s “‘Something Happened’: The Problems of Explaining the 1980 and 1981 Riots in British Cities,” in Race and Racism: Essays in Social Geography (1987); Martin Kettle and Lucy Hodge’s Uprising! The Police, the People, and the Riots in Britain’s Cities (1982); and the pamphlet “We Want to Riot Not to Work: The 1981 Brixton Riots” by the Riot Not Work Collective (1982).

8. There is a significant body of criticism on the Scarman Report and its aftermath. See Joe Sim’s “Scarman: The Police Counter-Attack” (1982); Martin Barker and Anne Beezer, “The Language of Racism: An Examination of Lord Scarman’s Report on the Brixton Riots” (1983); and Stan Taylor’s “The Scarman Report and Explanations of Riots,” in Scarman and After: Essays Reflecting on Lord Scarman’s Report, the Riots and Their Aftermath (1984).

9. See Abolitionist Futures, “The Brixton Uprisings of 1981: 40 Years On” (2021); and Samira Shackle, “5 Things We Know about Thatcher and 1981” (2011).

1. My review of anthologies during this period is drawn from Nigel Alderman’s “Anthologizing Poetry: The Movement and After” in A Companion to British Poetry, Vol. IV (2014).

2. In her chapter “Playing the Field: Anthologizing, Canonizing, and Problematizing Caribbean Women’s Writing,” Denise deCaires Narain discusses Cobham and Collins’s Watchers and Seekers, Ngcobo’s collection Let It Be Told, and Grewal’s Charting the Journey. Her emphasis, though, situates these anthologies within the context of Caribbean women’s writing. See Narain’s Caribbean Women’s Writing: Making Style (2002), 222–29.

3. The following overview of the history of British Black feminist organizations and Black feminist critical thought is indebted to several invaluable sources. See The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain, edited by Beverly Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe (1985, 2018); the special issue of Feminist Review “Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives” (1984); Amina Mama’s Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender, and Subjectivity (1995); Black British Feminism: A Reader, edited by Heidi Safia Mirza (1997); Feminist Review’s special issue on “Black British Feminisms” (2014); and Tracy Fisher’s excellent archival social history, What’s Left of Blackness: Feminisms, Transracial Solidarities, and the Politics of Belonging in Britain (2016).

4. See Rhonda Cobham’s “Introduction” to Watchers and Seekers (1987) on the significance of Marson, especially as a literary foremother to Black British women’s poetry.

5. On anti-racist, anti-fascist Asian youth political organizations in the 1970s and 1980s, see Anandi Ramamurthy’s Black Star: Britain’s Asian Youth Movements (2013).

1. My discussion builds upon the work of other scholars who have also examined Sulter’s preoccupation with Jeanne Duval. Gen Doy, for instance, emphasizes Sulter’s project of excavation and retrieval of lost Black women’s histories in Black Visual Culture (2000), 97–101. Deborah Cherry, perhaps Sulter’s most astute reader, emphasizes the ways in which Duval figures as image across the artist’s photoworks. For Cherry, Sulter’s visual experimentations with Duval express the relevance of “African diaspora women and African art to the formation of European modernity” (146) and, by way of Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1994), function as haunting, spectral presences that disrupt and destabilize the presumed coherence of modern, European art into something rich and strange through the crossings and contacts between Europe and Africa (154). See Cherry’s essay “Image-Making with Jeanne Duval in Mind: Photoworks by Maud Sulter, Reference Suhr-Sytsma and Ramazani1989–2003” (2015). Cherry has also written on revenants in Sulter’s other works, such as Syrcas, an image and text collection focusing on African peoples living – and disappearing – in Europe during the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s. See “The Ghost Begins Again by Coming Back: Revenants and Returns in Maud Sulter’s Photomontages” (2015). And on Sulter’s curatorial work, promoting and exhibiting Black art internationally in the 1980s and 1990s, see Cherry’s “With Her Fingers on the Pulse: The Transnational Curating of Maud Sulter” (2015).

2. Mitchell constructs a detailed biography of Duval (42–49) and provides a sustained commentary on how she figures in Baudelaire’s letters, among writings by his contemporaries, and in the poet’s later biographies (105–33).

3. See Rosello’s bibliography for an extensive list of the scholarship in French and postcolonial studies pertaining to Jeanne Duval.

4. Dabydeen cites several passages where Hogarth links slavery to his condition as an artist in The Case of Designers, Engravers, Etchers, etc., Stated Letter to a Member of Parliament (1734/1735). See Hogarth’s Blacks (1987), 132.

5. While my discussion focuses primarily on Dabydeen’s conversation with Turner’s Slave Ship, Jane Wilkinson has shown that the poem sequence also indirectly references several other paintings by the English artist, including A Fire at Sea (1835), The Parting of Hero and Leander (1837), Chevening Park (1801), and Sketch of a Pheasant (1815). See Wilkinson, “Prospero’s Magic or Prospero’s Monsters: Disabling Empire in David Dabydeen and Yinka Shonibare” (2010).

6. On the historical contexts shaping Turner’s relation to Abolitionism and the Zong Massacre, see Alfred Boime’s “Turner’s Slave Ship: The Victims of Empire” (1990), Ian Baucom’s “Spectres of the Atlantic” (2001), and Leo Costello’s J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History (2012).

7. According to Mitchell, “the central goal of ekphrastic hope,” or the attempt for the verbal to match the visual, “might be called ‘the overcoming of otherness.’ Ekphrastic poetry is the genre in which texts encounter their own semiotic ‘others,’ those rival, alien modes of representation called the visual, the graphic, plastic, or ‘spatial’ arts” (156).

8. See also Kate Siklosi, “‘The Absolute / of Water’: The Submarine Poetic of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!” (2016), on connections between Brathwaite and Philip’s submarine poetics.

1. In the Introduction, see note 2.

2. See Alison Flood’s 2018 Guardian article, “Ode to Whiteness: British Poetry Scene Fails Diversity Test.”

3. For a variety of reasons, I have since deleted my (formerly called) “twitter” account but the articles to which Evaristo refers in her February 8, 2018, tweets are Pallab Ghosh, “DNA Study Finds London Was Ethnically Diverse from the Start” (2015); Maev Kennedy, “Rhyme to Go Home” (2000); and Robin McKie, “Cheddar Man Changes the Way We Think about Our Ancestors” (2018).

4. See Sissay’s “Introduction” to Gold from the Stone on his personal and professional trajectory.

5. Readers can see Sissay’s numerous landmark poems on his website: www.lemnsissaylandmarks.com/.

6. See the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport’s statement, Our Promise for 2012 (2007).

7. See Tim Burrows, “Legacy, What Legacy? Five Years on the London Olympic Park Battle Still Rages” (2017).

8. Concerning the debate over the “regeneration” of East London and Olympic Park see Penny Bernstock, “London Olympics Has Brought Regeneration, but at a Price Local’s Can’t Afford” (2016); and Oliver Wainwright, “London’s Olympic Legacy: A Suburb on Steroids, a Cacophony of Luxury Stumps” (2016).

9. See Shanta Barley, “Toxic Waste Clean-Up on Olympic Site Cost Taxpayers £12.7m” (2010).

10. Citations from Besant’s essay, “White Slavery in London,” are from Tower Hamlet’s Local History Library and Archives, www.mernick.org.uk/thhol/thelink.html.

11. For a historical account of the strike, see Louise Raw’s Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and Their Place in History (2009).

12. See Lemn Sissay’s interview, “Presenting Sparked with Lemn Sissay,” about the women workers’ strike and the location of Olympic Park here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Vi_a0Xkddk.

13. I have drawn Narga’s biographical information from his website: www.daljitnagra.com/biography.php.

14. See Emily Duthie’s “The British Museum: An Imperial Museum in a Post-Imperial World” (2011); and Robert Aldrich’s “Colonial Museums in a Postcolonial Europe” (2009).

15. See Mark Brown’s “Activists Plan Oil Protest at British Museum” (2015); Charlotte England’s “British Museum Broke Own Rules over BP Sponsorship, Campaigners Say” (2016); and Jonathan Jones’s “Is It Time for the Arts to Start Saying No to Oil Money?” (2017).

16. See Michael Roddy’s “New British Museum Galleries to Help Counter Militants’ Image of Islam” (2015).

1. See Luke Morgan Britton’s “The Wiley-Dizzee-Skepta Beef Triangle Explained” (2019).

1. Since 2023, the Forward has added “Best Individual Poem Performed.” I did not include this category in the data sample due to its recent appearance.