“Poetry can be a genre of history,” proclaimed Natasha Trethewey, underscoring the role of historical poetry as a repository of cultural memory commensurate with and even more reliable than traditional histories. This chapter traces this distinctive turn to history among African American poets that emerged in the twenty-first century and characterizes aspects of the cumulative impact this verse has had of revising the nation’s history. It exemplifies this impact by analyzing “A Postcard From Okemah” by Terrance Hayes, which addresses a 1911 lynching; Evie Shockley’s “dependences,” which questions the reputation of Thomas Jefferson by demonstrating the contradictions between his words and his actions; and how, in leadbelly, Tyehimba Jess frees Huddie Ledbetter from the shadow of folklorist John Lomax and prominently positions him in the annals of American music. He offers a portrait of a Huddie Ledbetter who had agency, who hired a lawyer and sued for proper compensation, and whose musical contributions stand alone. In these new public histories, Hayes, Shockley, and Jess offer hope for a more just future.

The story of American literature and empire is vast and complex, its boundaries as hard to draw and as continuously disputed as the historical borders of the US nation-state itself. Historians of US empire tend to periodize their field into three broad eras of imperial formation: (1) continental expansion under the aegis of Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century; (2) the emergence of overseas empire with the Spanish-American War in 1898, when the US first acquired formal territories abroad; and (3) and the rise to globalism after World War II, when US military policing in the interests of global capitalism created an empire of military bases around the world while rebranding US imperialism and neocolonialism as embodiments of democracy and freedom, in part through a series of “endless” wars spanning the Cold War through the post-9/11 War on Terror. But for literary scholars, this broad historical periodization of empire loses coherence in the face of literature’s persistent ability to reimagine history, to make counterfactual claims, to invent new worlds, to change the experience of time, and to speculate and counter-speculate about the grounds of reality.

This chapter focuses on Captain Harry Foster Dean, a Black sea captain who has been largely forgotten but belongs to a lineage of Black Americans active in African repatriation movements from at least the early nineteenth century onward. Dean’s entire life was driven by the spirit of what we may call maritime Pan-Africanism—a variant of Pan-Africanism built upon aspirations of maritime capability. This chapter reveals what Marcus Garvey’s more familiar program, symbolized by the Black Star Line, can tell us about Dean’s significance to both Black Oceanic studies and the study of empire.

This chapter considers the development of musical practices related to increased musical patronage at princely and noble courts, as well as of other institutions that acquired greater profile as patrons of music within the ecclesiastical and civic spheres, but always from the perspective of ‘musicking’ during the age of discovery. Structured into six sections, which are based on the dichotomy between outside and inside and on that between written and oral, this chapter addresses the idea of urban soundscapes, with a focus on institutions such as cathedrals, churches, monastic institutions and court as acoustic spaces. It also analyses the impact of religious reform throughout the long sixteenth century, the musical practices in the domestic milieu, the impact of music printing on the accessibility of music, unwritten practices, such as improvised polyphony and ornamentation, and the international circulation of music and musicians.

This chapter traces the history and legacy of Furious Flower, conceived as a conference on Black poetry and poetics in 1994 and continuing to this day as an academic and cultural center housed at James Madison University. While such institutionality may find itself, at times, at odds with the most radical parts of the African American poetic tradition, it is nevertheless a fundamental way to establish historically marginalized writing in the literary consciousness of a nation. This chapter examines the shape and the substance of Furious Flower’s dedication to archival recording while also looking at the organization’s attempt to chart a poetic landscape for African American poetry after the Black Arts Movement, in an era that has seen explosive growth in the production of poetic work but, precisely due to that growth, is increasingly hard to describe as a unified “tradition.” The chapter identifies how, through its dedication to audiovisual material, Furious Flower has turned scores of deeply ephemeral events into something that can be experienced across time and space, repeatedly, for the sake of research, teaching, community-building, and history-telling.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, a writer with the last name “Du Bois” helped articulate the shifting contours and geographies of Pan African and Black anti-imperialist literature. This chapter charts the evolving understanding of Black anti-imperialism within evolving geopolitical conjunctures in W.E.B. Du Bois’s, Dark Princess; Shirley Graham Du Bois’s journal articles, short biographies, and political speeches; and David Graham Du Bois’s novel …And Bid Him Sing. This Du Bois genealogy exemplifies the shifting terrain of Pan-African literature and the politics of Black anti-imperialism in the era of Three Worlds. The chapter tracks the awakening of Black anti-imperialism in the context of global 1930s, the Third World terrain of the 1950s, and the African American Third World left of the 1960s and beyond.

How might we read Paul Laurence Dunbar as a poet of place and landscape? Dunbar wrote his poetry in an era where local color, regionalism, and realism were dominant forces in American literature, and his poetry engages in complex ways with these generic traditions. At the same time, Dunbar’s poetry, particularly his writing in non-dialect verse, is deeply influenced by his lifelong study of and engagement with British Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions, and the modes of environmental representation through apostrophe, lyric meditation, and balladic narrative central to these traditions. I read Dunbar’s explorations of place and landscape in dialogue with these intersecting influences, in and through which Dunbar develops a sustained reflection on struggle, displacement, violence, and unfreedom as the fundamental conditions of Black experience in the post-Reconstruction era United States. Less oriented by local specificity or realist detail, evocations of landscape and place in Dunbar’s work engender abstract and self-reflexive meditations on terrains of anti-Black violence and pain as well as sites of retreat and resilience in the face of these conditions.

This chapter sets out a framework to analyse the existence of international law in thirteenth-century Mongol Eurasia. It uses the category of the Universal Mongol Empire and the creation and use of the yasa (Chinggis Khan’s legal code) as the basis of the legal arena of the time. In addition to the Universal Mongol Empire, Inner Eurasia as a unit of history, the Mongol Commonwealth and the Mongol world system are used to identify the making and practice of international law in this period. The Mongol Khans articulated a specific world view that accommodated the disparateness of the Eurasian landscape, be it peoples, civilizations, religions or political ideologies. Governance (political and economic) of this multifarious empire relied on institutions that permeated throughout the empire and gave it coherence. Thus the focus is on conveying the meaning of sovereignty and law which was a product of interpolity relations that had taken place over centuries. Consequently the chapter seeks to broaden the discipline of modern international law by engaging with historic Eurasia, specifically Mongol rule in the thirteenth century.

This chapter examines a form of racialization at Rome that declared certain non-Romans to be innately suitable to enslavement. In an instance of racecraft through stagecraft, Roman comedy contributed to the naturalisation of this noxious ideology by presenting a cast of characters whose visual appearance and social or legal status corresponds directly to predictable sets of character traits. At the same time, the enslaved and freed themselves wrote and performed Roman comedies, so the fabula palliata also pushes back in important respects against their times’ racial formations. The discussion concludes with an analysis of the life of the comic playwright Terence whose authorship of his plays was called into question because he allegedly lacked the innate ability for impressive literary production.

Race-making is an inherently embodied activity, rooted in the senses and predicated on corporeality. As a result, visuality and materiality are central to processes of race-making, and studies of ancient visual and material culture therefore have much to contribute to modern scholarship on ancient race-making. This chapter explores what can be learned from visual and material culture about processes of race-making in the ancient Greek world, considering a series of examples. Although neither comprehensive nor representative, these examples demonstrate a variety of potential approaches, as well as highlighting some of the key challenges and limitations of working with visual and material culture.

This chapter considers different metaphors for racial encounters in American Classics departments, and how they interact globally. Beginning with the APA ‘Minority Scholarship’ in the early 2000s, the chapter traces different approaches to diversifying the demographics of traditional Classics departments in the United States, and how the field has developed in new regions. How might the proliferation of Classics programs in Southeast Asia be read as diaspora, or be distinguished from a form of neo-colonialism? How do Classics programs in Asia or the Global South interact with local histories of race and colonisation? Combining historical and contemporary case studies, this chapter reflects on different potential models of ‘diversifying’ Classics in a variety of global contexts.

This chapter describes the WTO dispute settlement system, focusing on its structure, procedures, and recent challenges. The WTO system, established in 1995, was a significant innovation in international trade law, featuring mandatory jurisdiction and a detailed set of rules in the Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU). It aimed to ensure adherence to WTO commitments and provide predictability to the trading system.However, recent US concerns over the Appellate Body’s functioning led to blocked appointments, rendering the Appellate Body defunct and the system non-binding. This crisis has led to the exploration of alternative mechanisms like the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA) and increased reliance on regional trade agreement dispute settlement mechanisms.

As the tensions between the Chinese population and the foreign sojourners and settlers of the treaty powers in post-1842 China led to a series of violent riots and deadly conflicts in the second half of the nineteenth century, the foreign powers were desperate to find an effective mechanism to prevent such occurrences. Influenced by a colonial siege mentality and the idea of a state of emergency, the treaty powers created an exception to international law, Western law and Chinese law by subjecting the Chinese government authorities to a regime of strict liability, holding them legally liable for all the ’anti-foreign’ incidents and the resulting damage to foreign interests, regardless of circumstances. This chapter investigates the historical forces and international politics that prompted this regime of strict liability in late Qing China. It calls for more attention to the deep-rooted connections between such practices in the age of empire and the various forms of emergency powers and security regimes that have continued to plague our modern world today.

The cultural discontinuities following the collapse of the Late Bronze Age Mycenaean kingdoms include the abandonment of major centers and smaller settlements accompanied by loss of social structures, literacy, quarried stone architecture, and figured representations. Archaeological evidence from four centuries later, in the eighth century BCE, shows that there were also important continuities, e.g., the Greek language, names of divinities, a warrior ethos, and communal feasting. Greek commerce both eastwards and westwards increased, and Greeks began to settle in the West Mediterranean and North Africa. This volume examines the Greek Iron Age, ca. 1200–700 BCE, between the Mycenaean collapse and the beginning of the Archaic period. The relative chronology of this period, based on carefully constructed sequences of pottery styles, provides a stable framework. However, recent radiocarbon dates have suggested that the absolute dating of the pottery styles should be revised upwards.