Race has been a dominant theme in studies of US black art and politics in the 1910s and 1920s. This chapter shifts focus to imperial concerns during a period marked by US occupations in Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, as well as the acquisition of the Danish Virgin Islands. It explores how the era’s print culture both revealed and obscured the expansion of a US Empire or Greater United States in the Caribbean. US governance in places like Haiti did not go unchallenged in leftist and race-conscious periodicals such as The Nation, The Crisis, and The Crusader. While non-fiction provoked anti-imperial analyses, fiction did not prompt the same responses. Assessing reviews and commentary of fiction, including Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem and Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death, this chapter examines why anti-imperial reading proved so elusive in this context.

Melville is one of the canonical writers without whom a literary history of empire could not be imagined. This chapter contextualizes Melville as a continental thinker and, from this comparative perspective, reconsiders his insights on empire with an eye to Spanish imperial history, US empire, British empire, and the overlap among them. The chapter concludes with a turn to José Martí, another intellectual-activist without whom the story of empire in the Americas could not be told.

Although children have migrated as long as people have, the child migrant story has received increasing attention in the United States since the “child migrant crisis” of 2014. At the same time that child migrants have been thrust into the media spotlight, a growing body of work in migration studies has emphasized necropolitics. As enduring symbols of vitality in literature and culture, children are supposed to be the antithesis of death. Focusing on descriptions of nine-year-old Javiercito/Chepito’s body and language in Javier Zamora’s 2022 memoir Solito, this chapter shows that efforts to contain the unaccompanied child migrant physically, temporally, and linguistically call attention to the necropolitics of migration, undocutime (the slow violence of illegality), and the coloniality of migration in the Americas—in particular, the United States’ expansion of its southern border and the role of youth in its extractive relationship to Latin America.

Now twenty-five years into the twenty-first century, the formidable legacies of Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) come into clear view. She lent her lyrical voice to celebrating the dignity, complexity, and heroism of ordinary people. Her portraits of the residents of Chicago’s South Side, where she lived most of her life, achieve vitality because of her skillful fusion of Black cultural tradition with modernist aesthetics. She saw her poetry chronicling the history of a transforming society in the service of truth and universal humanism. Brooks wanted her poetry “to vivify the universal fact,” and early in her writing career she found that humanism all around her as she looked from the window of her small second-floor apartment at 623 East 63rd Street. This chapter discusses Brooks as the singular inspiration for the inaugural Furious Flower Conference in 1994, her passion for inspiring young people to explore their gifts of writing and reading, her own distinguished career as an award-winning American poet, and her deep devotion to the craft of writing and the inventiveness of language.

The essay considers the relationship of the US empire to torture as a practice and an aspect of entertainment. Focusing on depictions of torture in film and television after 9/11, the article also looks back to the nineteenth century to show how torture functioned as a type of entertainment in an earlier historical context. Lazo argues that the use of torture in popular culture amounts to a type of “torturetainment” meant to entice the audience with its spectacle of violence. Through these forms of torturetainment, US cultural producers recognize, critique and flaunt the US willingness to use torture as a tactic to support its imperial ambitions while also masking the operations of empire through a focus on alternate narratives related to the goals of protagonists. These cultural representations thus reveal torture as part of the arsenal of empire and a discursive framing related to social conditions within a national polis. The chapter examines the film Zero, Dark Thirty (2012) and a dime novel from 1851 to emphasize the longue durée of torture as entertainment within the context of the US empire.

Linking worldview and geographical spaces, this chapter links place, aesthetic development, and ideological changes in the work of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. From the mix of fantasy, sci-fi, bebop, and rhythm & blues of his home town, Newark, through his years in the (largely) white, avant-garde culture of Greenwich Village and his transitional plunge into Harlem’s Cultural Nationalist milieu, to his long final activism as Newark’s pre-eminent Marxist-Leninist poet, Baraka became one of the most controversial figures of the twentieth century. Throughout these changes, Baraka’s poetry, with its evolving combination of Black vernacular speech, avant-garde technique, and political acuity, profoundly influenced Black American poetry and, in the process, the nature of contemporary American poetry itself.

This chapter establishes the spirituals as the bedrock of African American poetry to characterize the tradition as inherently innovative from its origins to the present. It challenges the standard claim that African American poetry begins with texts written by enslaved persons reflecting familiarity with canonical British poetry. In this approach, criticism has generally considered African American poetry in dialogue with the mainstream canon, whether emulating or criticizing its values. Privileging written texts in conventional forms has resulted in devaluing poetry reflecting characteristics such as orality, performance, anonymity, and communal collaboration. It also results in wide acceptance of an African American poetry canon that historically has overlooked the innovative nature of this genre from its origins and an ensuing tradition of avant-garde poetry. From this biased perspective, the spirituals have been overlooked as the genesis of African American poetry, even though that is their rightful place. Viewing the spirituals as the true foundation of this tradition implies shifting some assumptions not just about these poems, but about the place and meaning of originality.

This chapter investigates how Charles Hérard-Dumesle’s 1824 Voyage dans le Nord de Haïti contributes to early Haitian writers’ production of Haitian sovereignty. Hérard-Dumesle contributes to this larger effort by contesting the imperial genre of natural history that instrumentalized Haitian people and nature. Against the imperial natural histories that justified colonial extractivism, Hérard-Dumesle offers a Haitian mode of natural history that weaves together the real and imagined natural cosmologies of the Taino people, rural Haitian small holders, and Haiti’s postcolonial elite. This expressly political Haitian natural history and the poetic eloquence on which it ran aspired to redress tyranny not only for Haiti but also on a planetary register.

This chapter considers three significant New Negro Renaissance poets: Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Anne Spencer, and analyzes how they discussed themes of racism and gender inequality in their poetry. Although the critics of their day dismissed their poetry as raceless and apolitical, this chapter demonstrates how New Negro women writers utilized the domestic sphere of writing and wrote poetry that allowed them to articulate and explore their unspeakable desires. Black women poets were able to express their wholeness and sexual self-determination. Even though their writings may not have garnered critical acclaim and success, Black women writers were present and actively advancing Black feminist ideas. Extending the analysis of such scholars as Maureen Honey, Cheryl Wall, and Gloria T. Hull, this chapter illustrates that Black women writers fashioned a poetics that enabled them to discuss such subjects as sexuality and Black women’s right to autonomy and self-fashioned happiness. Their writings represent a profound yearning for freedom and sexual fulfillment, challenging the prevailing ideology that women’s primary realm of power was in the home.

This chapter characterizes The Sisterhood, a group of Black women writers who met in New York at least once a month for two years and who advocated for Black women at trade publishers such as Random House, at magazines such as Ms. and Essence, and eventually in academic departments as they moved their intellectual labor from political organizing in the 1960s and early 1970s to literary organizing in the late 1970s and then, after the 1980s, into colleges and universities. It traces how The Sisterhood’s collaborative labor shaped the reach, form, and content of African American poetry through a Black feminist poetics rooted in a both/and way of thinking and writing that insisted on the interdependence of political, literary, and academic spheres. They believed in literature as a tool for Black liberation. In works by poets such as Harryette Mullen, Erica Hunt, Mahogany Browne, Tara Betts, and Evie Shockley, each of these aspects of The Sisterhood’s poetic legacy remains visible in Black feminist poetry today.

Harlem’s sensuous poetics refers to an aesthetic sensibility that turned toward the possibilities of feeling, sense, and perception – the realm of the sensuous – to imagine new experiences of Black bodies and pleasure. Its poets drew from the maelstrom of urban life (nightlife in particular) to conjure new ways of inhabiting the body, new desires, and new ways of moving individually and collectively. They provided a new way to understand the role of Harlem as a space of illicit sexuality and self-expression in poetry. This chapter surveys this tradition, situating Harlem’s sensuous poetics in the context of representational challenges to the politics of respectability that shaped Black middle-class cultural norms in the era. It looks first to recurrent poetic tropes (such as the “dancing girl” and the “laughing boy”) that contested such politics. It then turns to the enunciation of a sensuous poetics within normative middle-class institutions such as women’s civic clubs and literary salons. In doing so, it argues that this tradition is less a set of formal principles than a way of being in the world that begins from the body’s sense perception and its felt response.

Following the Black Arts Movement, emerging Black cosmopolitan poets such as Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa published poetry that appeared to be quite different than poetry of the 1960s and 1970s. Both poets took pains in their writing to assert both racial affiliation and a world citizen identity. While early cosmopolitan theory struggled to accommodate race, more recent scholarship by Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo (Black cosmopolitanism) and Susan Koshy (minority cosmopolitanism) provides useful conceptual frames that explain why a contemporary Black poet might pursue a cosmopolitan poetic and show how it works in actual poems. Readings of selected poems across both poets’ œuvres demonstrate their deepening cosmopolitan sensibility over time, revealing how they position themselves and their work within a frame inclusive of both Black identity and a relatively privileged, global perspective. Having established the features of a Black cosmopolitan poetics in the work of two major poets of this generation, a question arises. Does the poetry of the current generation of Black poets, those following Komunyakaa and Dove, perhaps exhibit a post-cosmopolitan perspective?

This chapter starts from the proposition that both poetry and diaspora entail ways of configuring relationships between the general and the particular that may deviate from dominant philosophical tendencies. Without assuming a uniformly shared style or way of thinking, I argue for diaspora as the name of a common historical situation for people of African descent. Noting the concept’s emergence in the 1960s as an alternative to and continuation of older configurations of Pan-Africanism, the chapter then offers brief sketches of some key figures – Kamau Brathwaite, Dionne Brand, and M. NourbeSe Philip – and their relationships to language, gender, and politics.

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 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.