Chapter 10 - Radical Black Poetics and South–South Movement

Summary

This chapter explores Claudia Jones’s poetics of carcerality and politics of Black internationalism, linking conventions of poetic form to an ever-growing collective of revolutionary women. Jones’s poetry proposes a remapping of diaspora as a circuit of solidarity between women workers and revolutionaries that stretches from Puerto Rico to West Virginia to China and Russia. The extensive corpus of writing about Jones has yet to focus its attention on her poetic devices, and in particular her crafting of rhyme, syntax, and stanza structure. This chapter thinks through some of the ways that poetic tropes and schemes not only emerge from and reflect conditions that might be called diasporic, but also present unique visions of south–south movement and radical responses in their own right. Jones’s poetry challenges transhistorical claims about what poetry is, claims that have sometimes been produced through classroom-based pedagogies and genealogies.