Chapter 2 focuses on the dramatic monologues of Valerie Bloom, Jean “Binta” Breeze, and Amryl Johnson in the late 1980s and mid 1990s. In the aftermath of the radicalism of Black British feminist organizations in the 1970s, the politics of dissent remained an abiding force both in racialized feminism and in Black British women’s poetry. Bloom’s personae take on different postures towards Black feminist politics in Touch Mi! Tell Mi!. In Riddym Ravings, Breeze writes “meta-monologues” to take on the voice of marginalized, socially alienated, often psychically disturbed Black female figures. In contrast, Amryl Johnson composes a “multiple monologue” in Gorgons, which adapts the myth of Medusa in a contemporary context. While these authors certainly do not provide a blueprint for Black feminist praxis, their dramatic monologues voice dissent as constitutive of any racial politics of solidarity as an open-ended problem and unfinished process.

The Introduction delineates a core contradiction structuring British Black and Asian poetry over the past fifty years. This book tracks poetry’s increasing centrality in British culture even as poets and poems self-reflexively engage with deepening social inequality and racial violence. I situate my study in the context of post-1970s economic decline, in the field of Black British studies especially in the critical work of Stuart Hall, and in conversation with recent scholarship on poetry and race. Looking to T. W. Adorno’s concept of the “nonidentical,” I maintain that poems – as mediations of struggle, conflict, and contestation – stage crises of social inequality through crises of aesthetic representation. In particular, this book reads for poetic experimentations in persona as the key mechanism for inventing forms of racial politics, including resistance, dissent, recognition, progressive transformation, and abolition. The remainder of the Introduction provides an overview of the ensuing chapters, arguing that poetry remains a vital art form within an increasingly interconnected and deeply divided global Britain.

The Conclusion examines the publication, reviewing, and prizing of poetry in the last decade. What are the institutional mechanisms through which poets of color have increasingly been shortlisted for, won, and served as judges for the Forward Prizes and the T. S. Eliot Prize, especially since 2015? Looking to Self-Portrait as Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant, the Conclusion spotlights how a critically acclaimed and award-winning collection anticipates, questions, and challenges its own racial tokenization in the awards circuit. In the process, however, Allen-Paisant self-fashions Othello through the writings of Aimé Césaire, thereby inventing a radical racial politics premised in impenetrability and bewilderment as his strategy for animating ways of being with difference in struggle and community.

Chapter 4 examines twenty-first-century debates over canons, canon formations, and publishing in the writing of Bernardine Evaristo, Lemn Sissay, and Daljit Nagra. In particular, I pursue the aesthetic strategies they adopt to assert the centrality of Black British culture as a renewable canon in the making and remaking of Britishness. Conversely, the poets considered here also recognize how they operate within – and often seek to challenge – cultural institutions advancing precepts of diversity and inclusion even as their writing self-consciously acknowledges systemic oppression in contemporary Britain and the highly unequal domain of the publishing scene in particular. Whether in Evaristo’s novel in verse The Emperor’s Babe, Lemn Sissay’s public “landmark poems,” or Daljit Nagra’s British Museum, these authors lend to their work a progressive politics by excavating, revising, and transforming forgotten histories and counter-memories of violence for the sake of intervening in public discourses over race and national belonging.

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.