Chapter 1 discusses Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poems on Black youth, which intone a politics of resistance in the 1970s and early 1980s in the contexts of anti-Black violence, aggressive policing, and riot. For Stuart Hall, “policing the crisis” is tantamount to policing the category of “Black youth” as the social category through which the structural features of crisis become violently inflicted. LKJ’s dub poems “sound the violence” across Dread Beat and Blood, Inglan Is a Bitch, and his landmark poem on the 1981 Brixton Uprisings, “Di Great Insohreckshan,” which I read in the pages of Race Today (1982), where it was first published. The chapter concludes by discussing the poet’s literary acclaim with the Penguin publication of Mi Revalueshanary Fren in 2002. The arc of LKJ’s career – from a space of autonomy and advancing a politics of resistance to his literary recognition and canonization even as his writing illustrates how racial violence and social inequality persist and deepen – distills the movement of this book as a whole.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, artists of color began to gain prominence and squarely address the burden of recognition and the politics of representation over race and Britishness. Chapter 3 focuses on Maud Sulter and David Dabydeen, who highlight the Black presence in European and British art through the poetic genre of ekphrasis, or poems on visual art. In Sulter’s case, the Scottish Ghanaian lesbian artist conducts a series of “queer reframings” through her career-long preoccupation with Jeanne Duval, the common-law wife, “Black Venus,” and muse to Charles Baudelaire. In contrast, David Dabydeen takes on one of the most revered English artists in his long poem, Turner (Peepal Tree, 1995), which enters into conversation with Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying – Typhon Coming On, commonly known as The Slave Ship (1840). Their ekphrastic experimentations pattern forms of Blackness and racialized being whose radical alterity become “beyond recognition,” to the point of becoming nearly inscrutable and unknown in aesthetic form.

Chapter 5 studies the ways in which Bhanu Kapil and D. S. Marriott, two innovative British Asian and Black avant-garde writers based in the US, renovate lyric to invent a poetics of riot in the twenty-first century. The surplus of crisis – or what Joshua Clover has theorized in Riot. Strike. Riot as the new era of uprisings due to surplus economic immiseration disproportionately affecting racialized populations – appears in experimental form, which I call “surplus lyric.” In Ban en Banlieu, Kapil composes a cross-genre experimental poem to mediate instances of racialized violence against women spanning London, New Delhi, and the Bay of Bengal. In contrast, Marriott gives lyrical expression to a poetics of riot through his adaptations of the London-based underground musical genre of grime in his collection Duppies. Kapil and Marriott hold in common a political stance that envisions not progressive transformation but rather a radical abolition of the structures that perpetuate racial violence in Britain and elsewhere.

The book concludes with a short chapter that invites readers to re-consider the relationship between Truth Commissions and international law. It emphasizes the consequences of this relationship for the quality of state-society relations in the aftermath of violent conflict. It also highlights the importance of paying attention to who is authorizing the inclusion of local cultural expressions of violent conflict in the accounts produced by Truth Commission; who benefits from such inclusions; and what ends are being served.