Chapter 2 develops our theoretical argument of how an “anger rule” has been applied to Black Americans. Throughout American history, we make clear that Black political anger has been depicted as menacing. Special rules, laws, and devices have been instituted to keep what American society considers a dangerous form of emotional expression from being unleashed. Society has neutralized this anger by applying an angry feeling rule to Black Americans. If they break this rule by voicing anger, they will be penalized. This punishment takes different forms throughout American history, such as the brutality inflicted upon enslaved Black Americans, the lynching of Black Americans, the mass incarceration of Black men and women, and denying federal assistance to Black families. In this chapter, we focus on another penalty – electoral defeat. We theorize that whites invested in this anger rule will punish Black politicians for expressing anger. We also contend that Black Americans navigate this anger rule by strategically rallying behind Black politicians who constrain their anger in political spaces dominated by whites. However, in Black spaces, we argue that this anger has a home among Black Americans.

Studies of world literature and the Global Anglophone hinge on imagined locations where readers encounter texts: the university classroom, the state library, the airport kiosk. Yet all of these bookshelves are institutional, shaped by either the market or the state. In the meantime, South Asian authors themselves were constructing another collection, a “countershelf” of Latin American texts, authors, and locations through which they could identify against the Anglophone globe in which they were simultaneously compelled to circulate. Like the concept of a “counterpublic” from which it takes its name, the countershelf uses literature to enact a minoritized discursive space, one irreducible to – though not untouched by – institutional power. The Introduction traces the countershelf’s four key features: the idea of being “contrary” to a dominant, canonical tradition; of having been “curated” through interpersonal relationships with other readers and writers; of being “circulated” through channels both practical and affective; and, finally, of being “contested” between various writers participating in the tradition, rather than a site of pre-established ideological unity.