Through a focus on Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem “Praise Song for the Day,” and Amiri Baraka’s 9/11 poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” this chapter analyzes the twenty-first-century African American literary mood of melancholic hope (an inseparable fusion of melancholy and hope). When Citizen, “Praise Song for the Day,” and “Somebody Blew Up America” are read alongside each other, a profound tension emerges between the stasis of the afterlife of slavery and the movement of Black life that is not overdetermined by the afterlife of slavery. New ways of thinking about African American citizenship are one of the central focal points in the first decades of twenty-first-century African American literature. The simultaneity of the era of the first Black president (and the larger symbolism of a loosening of institutionalized antiblack racism) and the era of the Black Lives Matter movement continues to lead writers, working in the traditions of African American literature, to depictions of melancholic hope. This chapter ends with a focus on how the melancholic hope of twenty-first-century African American citizenship can produce a feeling of black transnational citizenship (the feeling of black collective unbelonging and a refusal of the imagined communities created by national borders).

The modern lyric, emerging in the late eighteenth century, is the genre par excellence of the private individual alone with their thoughts. The construction of material and psychic interiority for the normative bourgeois subject has relied on the violent dispossession of Black people through slavery, colonialism, and other forms of exploitation. This chapter first considers the possibilities of re-marking the lyric as Black – reading the claims of Theodor Adorno’s account of lyric’s social character through a history he does not consider – before turning to contemporary questions regarding the emergence of the lyric as the preeminent genre of African American poetry since the 1980s.

If so much of American poetry from the early twentieth century onward looks to revitalize the genre’s forms and conventions by mining from the national vernacular, then jazz has been both a model for that process and a source of expressive inspiration. This essay looks at the range of American poetic responses to jazz, from the early modernist efforts of poets such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Vachel Lindsay, to more contemporary figures like Nathaniel Mackey, Morgan Parker, and Kevin Young. In observing the long shadow that the music has cast on poetic experimentation, this survey also observes variations in identity and perspective and maps the reciprocal relationship between different jazz styles and modern poetics, including the tension between song lyrics and lyric poetry. Ultimately, this essay reveals through a wealth of examples the comprehensive heterogeneity of jazz poetry despite these writers’ shared starting points.

Aimee Zygmonski provides a close reading of Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman followed by a study of the creation of his Black Arts Repertory Theatre to provide an insider perspective into the development of the Black Arts Movement. Her study of Baraka’s racial and political awakening as represented in the increasing self-awareness of his character Clay allows her to identify emergent themes that would eventually inform “the Movement.” Although the Black Arts Movement did not last long, Zygmonski asserts that the awakened consciousness that resulted from this flurry of activity “reverberate[s]” in the works of more contemporary and present-day artists.

Introductory chapter for book that centers the work, labor, and effort of artists to script and share African American experiences on stage from the nineteenth century to the present day. It provides an overview of the major movements and moments in Black theatre, beginning with sorrow songs in the era of legal captivity to twenty-first-century stagings.

This chapter focuses on one major change in African American poetry of the 1980s: the propping open of doors to predominantly white cultural institutions for (certain) African American poets. The author refers to three overlapping sites of power: (historically white) academic institutions that train critics and poets, which began embracing more Black students and faculty; publishing venues that selectively promoted certain Black poets, which include presses operated by white universities; and white-run awards-granting bodies, which started to honor a few more Black poets. All shifted their approaches to Black poetry throughout the 1980s – both helping and hindering Black poets.

The 1980s was a decade in which African American literary production was starting to get the long overdue attention it deserved, but also a decade in which African American artists were emboldened to explore new territory, mainstream recognition be damned.The juxtaposition of James Baldwin’s funeral in 1987 and Trey Ellis’s essay “The New Black Aesthetic” in 1989 represent not a mere passing of the torch from the old guard to the avant-garde.Rather, the old guard was flourishing, and younger artists were also getting attention on new frontiers.In an unprecedented way, the 1980s marked an era when Black writers were sought out and recognized, to the point that their work dominated the critical conversation.This was especially true of Black women writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Rita Dove who enjoyed a readership unlike anything they had ever seen before.

Black literature of the 1980s grew in conjunction with the multifaceted cultural phenomenon known as Hip-Hop. A key aspect of this growth was the subversion of Eurocentric rules and expectations. This mindset connected to deep African American traditions on multiple levels. First, in rejecting the general belief that art should be made in accordance with Eurocentric aesthetic principles, Hip-Hop took its place in a long line of African American literary and artistic forms that took that position either as an explicitly political statement, as a reflection of respect toward African American audiences, or as some combination.Second, Hip-Hop also questioned specific tenets of Eurocentric art, such as the idea that written literature was more sophisticated than oral literature, or that linear development was inherently superior to cyclical forms. Third, Hip-Hop developed aesthetic and pragmatic strategies for making art outside of a Eurocentric framework. Fourth, Hip-Hop drew upon Afro-Diasporic conceptual frameworks and traditions as the foundation of those strategies. Finally, it used artistic debates around all of these questions as part of the art itself.

African American women writers of the 1980s were arguably the beneficiaries of cultural and political phenomena that held sway during the 1970s and 1980s.One of the major tenets and accomplishments of the Black Arts Movement and the Black Aesthetic of the 1960s was the validation of Black voices that came from within Black communities, drew upon the culture of Black communities -- especially the use of music and the vernacular -- and posited the validity, reality, and truth of that culture.Black women writersof the 1980s provide a logical progression from those communal assertions of value and freedom to extending the possibilities for such expression.This chapter considers the contributions of writers such as Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Rita Dove, Octavia Butler, Gloria Nayor, Sherley Anne Williams, and Toni Morrison as writers who extend and liberate creative and cultural possibilities initiated in earlier decades.

This chapter addresses the flowering of African American poetry that occurs from 1945 to 1970 against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement and in the context of a period of tumultuous change in the history of race relations in America. The chapter discusses how poets such as Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Amiri Baraka grapple in various ways with fraught questions about aesthetics, race, identity, and politics. The chapter examines the emergence of the influential and controversial movement known as the Black Arts Movement (led by poets including Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni) in the context of the turbulent racial violence and social justice movements of the 1960s.

Ready-made histories of 1960s cultural development might easily overlook Robert Hayden. His apparently genteel politics, reflected in commitments to racial cosmopolitanism and substantial reverence for the Western canon, distinguished him from many of the innovators and experimentalists of 1960s Black radical poetry. However, Hayden’s distinctive contributions to the decade played a key role in the evolution of African American poetics. His political aesthetic became an important model for successful Black poets of the later twentieth century. These academic poets, whose professional and intellectual lives were distanced from the economic and cultural exigencies of the Black majority, learned much from Hayden’s theory of aesthetic distance. While a powerful Black aesthetic of the 1960s called for art that appeared to spring from the heart of the Black folk masses, Hayden honed a deeply introspective Black poetics, which contemplated the experiential distance that stretched between the “colleged” poet-speaker and the Black folk world.

This chapter traces the ways in which, in the early 1960s, the Society of Umbra, an informal community of African American writers, artists, musicians, and activists, combined elements of bohemianism and Black cultural self-determination to lay the groundwork for the Black Arts Movement. It chronicles the emergence of the group from various activist and artist organizations of the Lower East Side of New York City as these African Americans became discontent with the political limitations of bohemian nonconformity and the artistry committed only to anti-bourgeois self-cultivation. Analyzing the poetry of Lorenzo Thomas, David Henderson, and Calvin Hernton, it clarifies how these poets pursued a shared attempt to reveal how bohemian libidinal energies could be transformed from personal artistry and individual redemption into a revolutionary Black nationalist consciousness that could, in turn, lead to collective action.

Langston Hughes was a crucial “midwife” of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. On a very practical level Hughes generously promoted, encouraged, published, and supportively criticized many of the younger (and not so young) Black artists who initiated Black Arts. He also provided a model of a Black poet and playwright who connected to a national grassroots African American audience in multiple ways, including regular reading tours, especially in the South and by publishing in the popular Black press. Finally, Hughes was a key progenitor of an aesthetic connecting Black literature, both poetry and fiction, to a continuum of Black music that was both an index and a shaper of Black consciousness, Black experience, and Black feeling that played an essential role in the growth of Black Arts poetics. In turn, the early Black Arts Movement had a marked impact on Hughes’s late work

While “Africa” historically figured as a fulcrum in African American literature for interrogating Blacks’ sociopolitical status in America, by the 1930s this relation had distinctly sharpened. Black American responses to the Italo–Ethiopian War (1935–36) and to Marcus Garvey’s failed populist “Back to Africa” campaign demonstrate how the 1930s marked a crucible in Black radical thought: civil and economic rights took on a global cast; colonialism and imperialism were read as patterned acts of aggression against Black and brown people; and US segregation emerged as yet another name for and variation on fascism. By the 1930s, Black Leftists almost obsessively attended to the racialized failures and frustrations of this historical moment in an effort to imagine and articulate new, pragmatic, and at times revolutionary strategies for addressing the Negro problem on a domestic and a global scale. The 1930s are bookmarked by attempts to both historicize Blackness and Black achievements on a micro and macro scale and concurrently imagine a way forward toward democracy.

Cognizant of the risks of oversimplification and unavoidable omissions, Carpenter’s essay introduces major movements and advances within the African American and Latinx American dramatic canons from the era of the civil rights movement to the present. Referring to select playwrights (Amiri Baraka, Luis Valdez, Adrienne Kennedy, Maria Irene Fornes, Lynn Nottage, and Quiara Alegría Hudes) as exemplars for this exploration, Carpenter offers a progressive build in this historical account, closing by focusing on the most contemporary of these dramatists. These celebrated artists are mere “tips of the iceberg”; they are highlighted here to inspire readers to pursue research and gain a greater sense of familiarity with the rich history and proliferating presence of racially and culturally diverse in American theatre. Carpenter reminds us that utilizing expressions such as “diversity and inclusion” will fall flat as trendy phrases unless theatre practitioners and scholars recognize and actively address the fact America’s network of regional theatre still has much to accomplish when it comes to actualizing commitments to equity.

Smethurst argues that the Autobiography of Malcolm X has deep roots in earlier African American autobiography, particularly the Christian conversion narrative and the slave narrative, notably the three life narratives of Frederick Douglass. For Smethurst, the defining chiasmus of Douglass’s first autobiographical narrative, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man,” structures The Autobiography, too — at least until Malcolm’s integration into the structure, theology, and ideology of the Nation of Islam. Smethurst argues that The Autobiography also follows Douglass’s three life narratives in that each of the latter not only retells the story chronicled in the first narrative but also unveils Douglass’s evolving positions, his developing political literacy, through later political moments, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the early rise of Jim Crow. The Autobiography does not project an end of the development with Malcolm X’s conversion to the Nation of Islam, but a continuing transition, his grappling with the rapidly changing domestic and international political and cultural environments of the 1960s.

This essay argues that at the center of Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetics, is a commitment to Gnosticism, a quest to find alternative ways of knowing. As an analogue to his sense that poetry at its best poses questions rather than seeking facile answers, Komunyakaa’s gnostic poetics is built around the impulse to embrace oppositions in which his poems endorse “critical values such as the virtue of transgression and the unity found in oppositions.” This essay argues that Komunyakaa’s poetics pursue a heuristic posture reminiscent of the emotional interiors revealed in blues music. Komunyakaa’s poems seek to explore the “strange debts we owe to others” along with “the strange debts we owe to ourselves, our imagination.”Looking at his later volumes of poems engage a variety of European landscapes and tropes, the influence of jazz and the blues on the poet’s oeuvre remains consistent. Employing Edward Pavlíc’s reimagining of James Baldwin’s notion of the “dark window” as a critical frame, this essay endeavors to provide a nuanced appraisal of Komunyakaa’s career, situating his poetry at the intersection of gnosis and improvisation.