This study examines the rich diversity of musical instruments and music and dance traditions in Spain, exploring those historically documented and those still thriving today. These cultural practices have been imbued with social, political, and ideological significance, becoming integral elements of Spain’s cultural heritage. The research also investigates the ongoing transformations within these traditions since the late nineteenth century, driven by the involvement of cultural and governmental institutions, musicians, enthusiasts, and various social groups. Case studies, including the Catalan sardana, the Galician gaita (bagpipes), music from Holy Week celebrations, and the rabel (rebec) and its jota repertoires in Cantabria, are analysed as representative examples. This approach to traditional music and dance aims to challenge common stereotypes and exoticised perceptions of Spanish culture. It underscores the complexity of these musical traditions, highlighting their vitality and role as markers of regional and national identity, while also addressing the challenges they face in an urbanised, dynamic, post-industrial, and increasingly secularised society.

This chapter conceives of Black Lives Matter-era poetry of mourning as forms of elegiac activism through which contemporary Black poets, including Lauren Alleyne, Mahogany Browne, Sequoia Maner, darlene anita scott, Nate Marshall, and Jericho Brown, achieve interconnected aims of refusing the naturalization of police and vigilante murders while making legible the ecology of US racism and of opening up a space to affirm Black being – or what Kevin Quashie terms “Black aliveness” – so that they participate in the antiracist struggle without being defined solely by it. Examining the work of poets who have been part of artistic resistance via #Blackpoetsspeakout videos as well as that of those who are better known for their published collections, this chapter also shows the diverse range of available forms and modes Black poets avail themselves of as they engage in elegiac activism and the Black world-building that it entails. Ultimately, this chapter emphasizes the durability of poetry in general and elegy in particular as intergenerational vehicles that link the poets and racial-justice movements of decades past to the pressing concerns of the present as well as to Black futures.

This chapter examines the representation of militarized modernity in American literature through three Korean immigrant writers: Richard E. Kim, Ty Pak, and Henz Insu Fenkl. Initially developed to explain anticommunist statecraft and gendered citizenship in South Korea during its military regimes, militarized modernity proves a productive term for exploring the culture of the migratory circuit between South Korea and the United States. By reading Korean immigrant writers through the lens of militarized modernity, the chapter goes against the critical tendency to view militarized modernity as exclusive to countries in the developing world. Instead, it argues that Korean immigrant writings show militarized modernity as already a part of American literature by foregrounding the traces of their own context of production that register both US imperialism and the ambiguous, changing status of South Korea from occupied country to ally, and finally, to sub-empire.

Phillis Wheatley Peters’s America was both a place and an idea, a reality and an aspiration. Through her writings she transformed herself from being a victim in the actual America into a voice for the America she envisioned. Wheatley Peters’ works should be considered diachronically, recognizing the significance of when she wrote what and to whom, rather than synchronically, as if her positions were unchanging over time. Anyone who attempts to identify her political beliefs must consider how free she was to express them, as well as whether the voice we hear is that of the author, rather than that of a persona she has created. Her image of America evolved radically during the 1770s, as did her vision of her place and role in it. The many ways in which Wheatley Peters subtly and indirectly confronted the issues of racism, sexism, and slavery are increasingly appreciated. Her ambition to be recognized as America’s unofficial poet laureate should be undisputed. Considered a remarkable curiosity during her lifetime, Wheatley Peters is now recognized as a major historical, literary, and political figure, whose significance transcends her ethnic, gender, and national identities.

This chapter defines Black feminist poetics as being a "miracle" rather than a "luxury" in that poetic articulation becomes a way to confront how ideas of US citizenship and personhood are predicated on positing Black women as a necessary "rapeable other." It identifes key moments of collaboration and key poetic premises – non-hierarchy, survival, poetry as essential to self-concept and imagining alternative social relations – by which Black women poets have articulated critical alternatives to social norms in order to capture the beauty of their own being.

The efforts among dozens of editors to reprint and thus circulate compositions by Black poets in anthologies across the decades constitute an extraordinary ongoing saga in the production of African American literature. Without collections bringing together large groups of Black poets in the pages of individual books, the view of an interconnected Black literary tradition may have been far more difficult to realize. Further, the presence of Black poets in primarily white anthologies diversified the racial and cultural hegemony of those collections and extended the readership of African American writers.

The chapter explores the role of music in shaping Spanish popular culture, linked to the construction of a national identity, considering the tensions between modernisation and tradition. The text examines genres such as the cuplé and Spanish song (later called copla). The latter became tied to the cultural autarky of early Francoism with a strong influence of Andalusian elements as the dictatorship progressed, music played a role in articulating mild youth dissent (rock, beat, yeye) and open political dissent (nova cançó, singer-songwriters). During late Francoism and the democratic transition, various genres articulated countercultural (psychedelia, progressive rock), regional (Andalusian or ‘gypsy rock’), youth (punk, Basque radical rock), and class (urban rumba, urban rock, hard rock) identities. The chapter also analyses La Movida, discussing its contested transgressive and postmodern elements. Finally, it examines new discourses of authenticity in Spanish indie music and glocal sounds, the revival of singer-songwriters, and musical proposals responding to the negotiation between globalisation and difference (rap), as well as transcultural hybridisations of pop with various Latin music styles, urban music, and electronic sounds up to the present day.

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.

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 examines the development of Spanish music in the seventeenth century, a period often described as one of decline following the Golden Age of Renaissance polyphony. Challenging this view, it highlights the cultural transformations that reshaped secular music, particularly its ties to poetry, theatre, and dance. The expansion of public theatres and the rise of new poetic forms, such as the romance nuevo, influenced musical composition, fostering the development of tonos humanos. Stylistic shifts included the growing prominence of the strummed guitar, the popularity of dance-songs like the zarabanda and chacona, and the widespread adoption of triple metre with hemiolas. The chapter also explores the role of music in Spanish theatre, distinguishing between public and courtly productions, and examines the emergence of mythological zarzuelas and comedias with extensive musical content. Additionally, it offers a fresh perspective on sacred music, stressing the interplay between traditional elements and new concertato conventions, as well as the enduring significance of the villancico in churches throughout the period and beyond. By drawing on both written sources and oral traditions, this study reframes seventeenth-century Spanish music as a dynamic and evolving landscape, marked by distinct and innovative characteristics, rather than a mere decline from earlier heights.

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.