How do poets participating in a Black poetry community navigate between collective purpose and creative individuality, with respect to both political and artistic goals? This chapter engages this and related questions, offering an account of Cave Canem as a resource and force within contemporary Black poetry – but not in an institutional history. My focus here is not the foundation that has been an engine of empowerment and an influential player in the world of twenty-first-century American literature, but rather the ongoing, dynamic gathering of writers that describes itself as “a home for Black poetry.” What can we learn by constructing an aesthetic history of this organization? This effort will lay the groundwork for future scholarship that can more thoroughly explore what Cave Canem demonstrates about the power of collective action and mutual support to change culture, as well as the gravitational pull of the culturally familiar.

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 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 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.

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.

This chapter deals with the interrelationships between forms of American English and Caribbean English and creoles, both past and present. Close demographic connections between the North American mainland and what was to become the Anglophone Caribbean have existed since the earliest days of colonial settlement. Later, American linguistic influence spread in the region through institutional links, occasional visits or migration by Caribbean nationals for work or education, and tourism as well as television. During the present age of globalisation, American English has extended its range and impact considerably, both worldwide and in the Caribbean. At the same time, individual Caribbean creoles such as Jamaican have also influenced the development of English in North America, by way of diaspora communities, the global success of reggae, dancehall and Rastafarianism, and the use of ‘Cyber-Jamaican’ on the web.

The word griot has been linked with hip-hop since its early days in the 1980s, but it is a fragile connection. Initially used by French travelers to West Africa who thought they were using a local term, it refers to hereditary praise singers, instrumentalists, and oral historians. Although there is some overlap between what modern-day rappers and griots do, there are also some significant differences, especially in their social status and roles in society. If rap has distant origins in Africa, dispersed via the transatlantic slave trade, and come back transformed, then how can we think about the highly specialized skills and roles of griots in Africa, their inspirations in the diaspora, and their intersections with rappers? Tracing the institution of griots in western Africa and charting how the term took root and expanded in the US will help us appreciate their congruencies and incompatibilities with hip-hop.

The chapter examines how India’s emergence as the world’s largest source of international migrants has affected its economy. It first provides a brief framework to understand international migration’s economic effects, arguing that these depend on selection and sorting effects inherent in migration: who goes, how many go, where they go, why they go and how many return. It then examines the different mechanisms and magnitudes of these effects through different types of financial flow via both the current account (remittances) and the capital account (bank deposits, bonds, FDI), via the network effects of the diaspora on trade and via human capital effects due to a ‘brain drain’. It concludes by arguing that the economic effects of migration on India have depended primarily on factors within India. People leave for a reason and will invest only if it makes financial sense to do so.

This chapter turns to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Swahili coast narratives, focusing on his novel Desertion (2005), which tells stories about interracial intimacies between Indian, Swahili, and European characters across multiple generations in colonial and postcolonial periods. In the nineteenth century, colonial debates on Indian emigration to Africa insisted on a clear racial separation between “native” Africans and Indian “settlers.” Late twentieth-century East African nationalist discourses reproduced this racialized indigeneity as national identity. Gurnah’s critique of this racial nationalism lies in the novel’s experimental aesthetics, which involve perspectival storytelling, nested stories, and inclusion of multiple genres. The novel’s layered narration gives expression to abject, repressed Indian Ocean intimacies, reconfiguring colonial models of racial encounter as part of the longer history of migration and exchange in Indian Ocean. The melancholic return of Indian Ocean affiliations troubles both the racial-dystopic conception of nationhood in postcolonial East Africa and the utopic imagining of a multiracial community of the past or future.

This chapter attends to the legacies of Indian Ocean migrations in Indian contexts, where nationalist politics also underwent a process of conflating national identity with not just territory, but with women as integral to that territorial sense of nationhood. Specifically, it examines queer desire and the gendered construction of the nation through Mauritian writer Ananda Devi’s novel Indian Tango (2007). Devi rewrites Satyajit Ray’s cinematic adaptation (1984) of Rabindranath Tagore’s influential national allegory Ghare-Bāire (The Home and the World) (1916) from a transnational queer feminist perspective. Examining the novel’s intertextual relationship with Tagore’s text, Ray’s film, and early twentieth century anti-indenture discourses, the chapter argues that Devi reorients feminine desire towards an erotic autonomy that reimagines diasporic affiliation and challenges the control of female sexuality within the heterosexual family as the basis of the nation. The assertion of diasporic connection through female erotic autonomy doubly deconstructs the Indian nationalist subject defined through the exclusion of the diasporic other as well as the queer female other.

Co-written with Hala Jaber, John Nutekpor, and Ewa Żak-Dyndał, this chapter explores the concept of folk music within the framework of migration and discourses of belonging. It takes as its point of departure the experiences of the author, a child of Irish migrants to America, now working in the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, and three of her doctoral students from Palestine, Ghana, and Poland. The paradoxes often inherent in the concept of folk music are further complicated by the experience of migration in the twenty-first century. An exploration of recent scholarship on music and diaspora, migration, and social inclusion demonstrates the power of ‘folk music’ as a fluid, imagined concept within which identity and belonging can be negotiated. The chapter includes three case studies related to performance research with new migrant communities in Ireland. It concludes that migration fosters the need to create new imaginaries of belonging and that music is a primary strategic resource in this endeavour.

The chapter analyzes how the diasporic motif of the non-Jewish Other has been utilized in Hebrew literature in Israel over the last three decades. Notwithstanding a change in Jewish identity from a minoritarian to a majoritarian perspective, this motif continues to shape the contemporary Hebrew literary imagination. By pointing, among others, to the figure of the most important non-Jewish Other in Israeli reality – the Palestinian – this chapter will argue that this category, though obviously mediated by current Israeli circumstances, is indeed built on the foundation of the diasporic category of the “goy.” What does the ongoing vitality of this motif, despite the transformations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, tell us about the relationship between continuity and breakage in contemporary Hebrew literature and Israeli Jewish identity? By pointing to specific images present both in the pre-State Hebrew literary canon (e.g., texts by Hayim Nahman Bialik, Josef Hayim Brenner, and Shmuel Yosef Agnon) and in the Israeli literary mainstream of the last three decades (e.g., texts by Yehoshua Knaz, Dorit Rabinyan, and Sami Berdugo), this chapter will analyze the role of the non-Jewish Other for the projection of a Jewish Israeli national identity and its consequences.