U.S. empire depends upon the logics of sexual normativity for their natural-seemingness. As an epistemological project, US empire shapes our understanding of what sexuality means. This chapter offers that the history of American literature and empire reveal how sexuality is inherently political, that desire is itself part of the political world; its contours are filtered through the relations of race and power that operate in the public sphere. There is a lot we don’t know about sexuality: it is too amorphous a collection of acts, desires, fantasies, and ideas to claim dominion over. What we know, however, is that US empire’s remapping of power relations, norms, identities, and territory operates with and through the desires we hold to be most intimate, and that American literary study is key to better understanding the sexual scope of empire’s reach.

This chapter examines Spanish music during the interwar period (1918−39), a stage that coincides with the final two decades of the so-called Silver Age. It highlights the plurality of musical languages used to represent Spain’s evolving – and never fully agreed upon – national identity, with stylistic approaches ranging from late Romanticism to Neopopularism and Neoclassicism as predominant trends. Additionally, this chapter considers the extent to which the tense political climate and the debates between tradition and modernity also influenced repertoire programming, the activities of musical institutions, and the work of performers. Finally, the study explores the roles and spaces occupied by music during the Spanish Civil War and offers a perspective on Republican exile, aiming to reconstruct the trajectories of those musicians who were persecuted under Franco’s regime.

This chapter identifies the intersection between the role of hip-hop music in literary poetry and the operation of poetics in rap by chronicling the parallel histories of the music and the poetic practices developed alongside and in response to it. It traces the emergence of rap from party music, identifies what constitutes poetics in the lyrics and the construction of the music, and clarifies how the music and literary poetry overlap in spoken word, in slam poetics, in TV shows like Def Poetry Jam, and in emerging academic programs and centers.

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 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.

Music theatre was central in Spanish musical activity between 1850 and 1950. A thriving cultural industry developed in Spain and Latin America, with numerous companies, performers, and publishers, involving composers from different generations, such as Barbieri, Gaztambide, Chueca, Bretón, Chapí, Sorozábal, and Torroba, among many others. In this context, this chapter explores how the label zarzuela encompasses a wide variety of formats: zarzuela grande (similar to French opéra comique), zarzuela bufa, popular music theatre (within the so-called teatro por horas), revista, and lyrical comedy. In all of them, music plays a key role, offering great stylistic variety that blends national and international styles. Spanish music theatre accommodates all nuances of musical dramaturgy, ranging from popular music theatre to more elaborate examples –formally and dramatically speaking – akin to opera, making zarzuela a viable alternative to national opera.

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 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.

The sonnet has been in wide use among African American poets since the late nineteenth century. This chapter traces the African American sonnet from its emergence through the Harlem Renaissance in order to understand the popularity of a form often associated with white European literature. It shows that the sonnet initially was a means for Black writers to get published in the genteel quality magazines which shaped literary and political debates around the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, the sonnet served as a vehicle for community building and as a forum in which foundational questions of Black poetics could be negotiated. Discussing writers from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, the chapter identifies four impulses that guided African American approaches to the sonnet form: the contests over the commemoration of the Civil War; the subversive appropriation of genteel poetic conventions; the self-confident political protest of the Harlem Renaissance; and the quest for a vernacular modernist idiom.

The mid 1960s and early 1970s Black Arts Movement (BAM) was an artistic and cultural renaissance rooted in the desire to mobilize an aesthetic tied to black self-determination. Like the multidirectional flow of this regional, national, and transnational movement (east, west, north, and south), the lines of the poetry were moving in many unexpected directions. BAM poets were committed to representing blackness, but the impulse to represent blackness often became inseparable from the impulse to experiment with new ways of representing blackness. The movement set in motion a deeper understanding of the inseparability of forms of black representation and forms of black experimental space. With a particular focus on the BAM in the South and black women poets who developed a southern Black Power feminist orientation, this chapter examines the subtleties and nuances of the poetics of space that shaped the BAM.

This chapter takes a postcolonial-ecocritical perspective on a particular mode of empire referred to as ecological-agrarian imperialism. It examines aesthetic articulations of colonial agrarianism with a special view to James Fenimore Cooper’s Littlepage trilogy and The Crater, which are read in the context of Indian Removal and the Anti-Rent conflict in the Hudson River area. It argues that Cooper registers a remarkable critical awareness of the historical origins of the sociocultural conjunctions of soil depletion, food scarcity, biodiversity reduction, and colonial capitalism. Cooper’s works can help us think through the interrelated ecological challenges of our own time such as climate change, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss, and to reflect on utopian possibilities and roads not taken when the social and economic foundations of the United States were laid out.