This chapter enacts a practice of “critical commonplacing” to assemble a new global archive of Romanticism, taking as its examples twentieth- and twenty-first-century remediations from Buenos Aires, New York, and Tokyo. Commonplacing a new Romantic archive finds a model in the world of collecting, which valorizes marginalia, marks, scratches, cut-and-pastes – capturing flashes of ephemera over static texts and images. From Japanese depictions of Mary Shelley’s creature as bakemono, to Julio Cortázar’s biography on John Keats during the Latin American Boom, to Audre Lorde and Diane Di Prima’s schooldays clique “The Branded,” this chapter expands the archive of Romanticism beyond 1780–1830, across different languages and media. Turning away from the anthology and canon, this approach replaces static texts with the dynamic media of seemingly fleeting forms, often ephemeral and ghostly dispersed. Each example showcases the experimental quality of commonplacing, aligned with progressive youth culture, learning, and play.

Chapter 4 further considers how the city informs young women’s means for realising their much hoped-for futures by focusing on how they navigate the social infrastructure that underpins its daily life. Paying particular attention to young women’s friendships with other young women, the chapter details this group’s fears of ‘fake friends’ and the anxieties they have towards those close to them having the potential to cause them (and their futures) harm. As the ethnography shows, mobile phone communication has afforded young women new styles of communication that allow them to overcome the fears of social intimacy, helping them to stay connected with others while maintaining social distance. Enabling young women to remain visible in urban life from the confines of their homes, and to engage in conversation without revealing personal information, mobile phones provide young women with an alternative social life, re-ordering their experiences of the city while enabling them to remain embedded within the social relationships that sustain it.

In this chapter we examine other areas in which the Shrikhande graph has a role to play, including Seidel switching and equiangular line sets (which give rise to our final construction of the Shrikhande graph), design theory, Hadamard matrices and distance-regular graphs.

We begin with a short section indicating a few directions in which the study of the Shrikhande graph has been taken. Most of the detail is omitted, and we refer to the cited papers.

Western philosophy has neglected the body for much of its history, even though it is the body that enables us to have a hold on the world and interact with other people. Beauvoir wrote extensively not about ‘the body’ in general but about the diverse bodies that humans have, and the various phases and states that a single body undergoes. Her presentation of female biology is rather controversial and undoubtedly dated, but her insistence that a body’s characteristics are only good or bad in relation to a particular physical and social environment is still crucial. The ‘facts’ that she borrowed from the science of her time, as well as her views, are placed in dialogue with those of current authors and scientists. The exploration of ageing and sick bodies that she carried out both in general philosophical terms and in her poignant memoirs of Sartre’s last decade and her mother’s last days has lost none of its significance.

In this chapter we consider strongly regular graphs, an important class of graphs for many applications, which include both the Shrikhande graph and the graphs associated with Latin squares, all of which play a part in our story.

This theorem was proved by Erdős, Rényi and Sós in the 1960s. It was an early success for the methods of algebraic graph theory.

We assume that friendship is an irreflexive and symmetric relation on a set of individuals: that is, nobody is his or her own friend, and if A is B’s friend then B is A’s friend. (It may be doubtful if these assumptions are valid in the age of social media – but we are doing mathematics, not sociology.) In other words, the situation is described by a graph, in which the vertices are the individuals and two vertices are joined if they are friends.

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.