Given the extent to which queer writers have played starring roles in most of what we think about when we think about the representative movements and innovations of modern American poetry, this chapter takes up the question of the association between poetry and queerness, asking how the aesthetic invention that characterizes modern American poetry might be related to the expressive capacities of sexuality. My limited and speculative response to this question focuses on how poets, and particular poems, have exploited the queer affordances of the lyric genre. The historical rhyme between the “queer” and the “poet” across the first half of the twentieth century evinces how the uneasy consolidation of aberrant sexual practices into modern homosexual identity coincides with the uneasy consolidation of poetry, in all its diversity, into a particular understanding of the lyric. If the twentieth century presents the gradual conflation of poetry and lyric, modern queer poets found in the lyric’s shared set of expectations a means of living within the social and its reductive demands for visibility, intelligibility, and transparency, while still holding space for the strange or unknowable.

This chapter examines the aesthetic and imaginative significance of sound play, taking for its case study the poems of George Oppen. The chapter proposes that poetic sound play offers poets a way to explore value, whether it be a single vowel's sound value, a poet's preoccupation with certain subject matters, or that poet's particular political commitments. Through close readings of poems from across Oppen's career, and especially of Oppen's assonance and alliteration, the chapter argues that sound play becomes a social allegory, registering political possibilities which, on occasion, go beyond the poems’ explicit representations of social life. The chapter also shows how, as each sonic value is born afresh in each new usage, this sound play extends beyond the single poem to multiple poems. In the case of Oppen, sound play's continual production of the new through recombination promises, even as it cannot achieve, a future beyond capitalist reproduction.

The history of American music writing – essays on music, criticism, reviews, pamphlets – is told in this chapter, beginning in the nineteenth century, when an identifiably American music still had not fully coalesced. The early twentieth century saw the arrival of strong music advocates and composer-writers who sought to create innovative music and write prolifically about these new sounds, for which they had become de facto evangelists. Early American music writers underscored the differences between American and European music. Essays on music took on an increasingly pedagogical function, teaching their readers about the intricacies and sometimes hidden features of new compositions. The earliest American music writing focused on classical music, but as jazz entered the scene, with its complex rules and unfamiliar rhythms and chord structures, a new cohort of essayists developed a language for writing about this American artform. Throughout the century, a more personal tone emerged in the music essay as composers, musicians, and music connoisseurs began to articulate their feelings, impressions, memories, and individual experiences.

This chapter delivers the rich history of the American comic essay. From its inception in the seventeenth century, sociopolitical concerns have dominated the genre. Borrowing from British sources and employing features common to humorous writing, the American comic essay customizes these for an American public using national imagery, local allusions, and distinctly American language. Earlier humorists voiced independent religious and political ideologies even before the formation of the new nation. Later, fictional personae expressed themselves in hyperbolic style and used vernacular and vulgar language, laden with irony and sarcasm, to capture the discontinuities of the industrializing nation. Articulating ethical visions of the new democracy, literary comedians like Artemus Ward expanded the naïve, deadpan voice brought to international prominence by Mark Twain. Later essayists maintained the rhetoric, persona, exaggeration, and irony that caricature American pragmatism, and further expanded the range of themes to include personal psychology, sexuality, and other once taboo topics. The chapter’s final pages feature the diverse contemporary landscape of American humor writing.

This chapter analyzes the rich essayistic activity of the Harlem Renaissance (1919–1940). Through the visual arts, music, and literature, many African Americans responded to the changing national and international dynamics of the 1920s as an opportunity to leverage their creative arts and redefine their place within the nation. Poetry and fiction were the literary genres African Americans increasingly employed for these efforts. More ubiquitous was their frequent complement: the essay. Writers like Gwendolyn Bennett, Benjamin Brawley, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and Eulalie Spence infused the essay with this ethos and positioned it as an equally important genre for chronicling the period. Indeed, it was through the essay that readers in the United States and in other parts of the world encountered rhetorical styles reflecting the racial pride and determination of the “New Negro.” Essays from the period detailing the array of forces and ideas shaping African American life – including migration, racial violence, civil rights, and Pan-Africanism – constitute dynamic narratives combining history, opinion, and critical redress.

Margaret Bonds’s upbringing and education inculcated in her a profound sense of pride in her racial and familial heritage and an equally profound sense of obligation to “go farther” than those who came before her in using her art for the betterment of the lives of others. Moving from her youth through her years as a struggling musician in New York and Los Angeles during the Depression and World War II, through her ascendance to national and international fame, this chapter traces the development of these themes in her personal philosophy and compositional work over the period ca. 1939–63 in works including the incidental music to Shakespeare in Harlem, The Ballad of the Brown King, and Simon Bore the Cross, leading to their coalescence in The Montgomery Variations (1963–64). The Variations thus emerges as the summit of Bonds’s works centered on the theme of racial justice up to that point.

The Great Migration, which began in the late nineteenth century and witnessed the movement of more than six million Black folk from the agrarian US South to the urban North between 1919 and 1970, and the flourishing of “Black Renaissances” in Harlem, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other Northern urban centers were the essential soil in which are rooted not only the two works that are the subject of this book, but also the lives and careers of Margaret Bonds, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes. This chapter explores the roles of those two large societal seizings of freedom for the poor and oppressed as the context for Margaret Bonds’s career and the source of her career-long commitment to using her art to uplift what she in 1942 called “our oppressed Race” and work for global equality.

After the heavy saturation of blues performing in the 1920s and the application of various elements– rhythm, syncopation, call and response, lyrics, and so on– to avant-garde literature, Black and white, of the time, the country descended into a prolonged Depression in the 1930s. Blues recording ground nearly to a halt for several years, though conditions that fed into the blues were in ample supply. The music was changing with the amalgamation of swing band elements and boogie-woogie with the rural blues, producing a jumping hybrid that used blues structures and lyrics with a big-band lilt. The move to the Left, especially in the artistic community, found literary blues having a decidedly Leftist feel in writers such as Langston Hughes, holding over from the twenties and Frank Marshall Davis emerging in the thirties. There were still the musical artists from various genres, including classical, who made use of the blues, and movies, for example, reflected the music as well. It was a new kind of hot music– and thus, hot music literature– that was in the offing.

Scat and vocalese are two approaches to jazz vocality. This essay intervenes into dominant narratives of their history, value, and functions and encourages us to conceptualize a broader, contradictory view of what they have been and done. This view both acknowledges the narrative of Louis Armstrong giving birth to scat in 1926 and that scat was widespread far earlier; it points to how scat has occupied both sides of Lindon Barrett’s binary of the singing/signing voice, variously functioning as institutionalized vocality that claims authority by Othering certain music as nonmusical and marginalized vocality denied legibility by hegemonic musical norms. Alongside these reflections on the cultural politics of jazz voice, the reader is guided through explorations of the scat existing before scat; the less-celebrated recordings of the most-celebrated scat singer, Ella Fitzgerald; and the ways scat’s meanings are reshaped by poetry and by lesser-known singers of the past and present.

The Montgomery Variations and Credo were not just timely musical masterpieces; they were also large-scale compositions dealing with racial justice and global equality that were penned by an African American woman, an individual to whom the doors of the classical music performance and publishing establishments were closed because of race and sex. Both works may thus be understood as compositions tendered from within a double application of the “veil” or “double-consciousness” that Du Bois had seminally discussed in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk – one application is that of race; the other, that of sex. Keenly aware of both of her doubly veiled existence and of the near-total absence of Black folk and women in orchestras, as well as their disproportionately small presence in choruses and audiences, Margaret Bonds undertook a gambit of dual perspective. She used the rhetoric of White Euro-American classical music to valorize contemporary African Americans and others who bravely fought against the system with which most performers and audiences of that music normally identified. The chapter closes with a reflection on the crucial role played by Bonds’s personal and professional affinities with Langston Hughes in inspiring her to this gambit.

With Langston Hughes as tour guide, this chapter sounds the (ostensible) paradox of jazz abroad: on one hand, jazz has often been perceived as indubitably, authentically “Black,” a racially encoded expression. On the other hand, jazz’s inherent multivalences oscillate on transnational frequencies that have resonated and continue to resonate with all kinds of people all over the world. The story of jazz abroad, then, is also the story of Blackness on the move, a journey perpetually navigating a course between authenticity and hybridity, individuation and polyvocality, originality and imitation. This jazz dialectic amplifies Blackness as a floating signifier and allows for the performance of fluid, transnational identities that defy homogenizing taxonomies of race, class, culture, or nationhood. And so, jazz– and jazz abroad especially– is (paradoxically) both, a distinctly Black American art form, and at the same time world music long before we had a term for it.

Monica White Ndounou focuses on Bert Williams, George Walker, and Langston Hughes. Through a close reading of their seminal productions, she reveals how the artists attempted to challenge existing theatrical stereotypes and caricatures of Blackness. Ndounou reads these figures as trailblazers, paving the path for future artists who were able to present more accurate depictions of African American life on the Broadway stage. The author covers more than fifty years of theatre history, from the emergence of Williams and Walker in the late nineteenth century to the premiere of Hughes’s The Barrier on the Great White Way in 1950.

The fascist counter-revolutions and reactionary insurgencies that disfigured Europe across the ‘Thirty Years War’ 1914–45 generated, in the realm of literature, art, music, and periodical publication, a complex culture of resistance in anti-fascism. More than the sum of its socialist, liberal democratic, Communist and feminist parts, anti-fascism formed a distinct cultural sphere in Europe and the United States, with its own newspapers, journals, publishing styles, and audiences. The links it forged between European and non-European poets and writers focused on the threat of fascism in Austria, Germany, and Italy, provoked, in turn, questions about the nature of European colonial war abroad, gender relations in democratic nations, and the sources of fascism’s strength. Paying particular attention to both the place of gender in the anti-fascist imagination, by way of a reading of Virginia Woolf, and the anti-colonial challenge anti-fascism faced, this chapter explores literary responses to fascism.

Afro-Latin American newspapers included extensive coverage of Black populations in other countries.Articles on Black populations and race relations in Latin America, the United States, and Europe and Africa are examples of “practices of diaspora,” international communication and engagement among Black peoples that grew out of, and helped to forge, feelings of connectedness and racial solidarity.The Black press also reported on, or offered commentary on, more formal political movements promoting Black internationalism, such as Garveyism.Black papers in Argentina and Uruguay reported regularly on their northern neighbor, Brazil. Cuban papers included Puerto Rican and Dominican writers and discussions of Haiti. Throughout Latin America, writers and intellectuals of all races watched with mixed horror and fascination the workings of racial segregation and anti-Blackness in the United States.Diasporic ties were further thickened by travel, migration, and personal connections and friendships among African American and Afro-Latin American writers and intellectuals.

Writing the history of African American literature in the 1930s necessitates reconsidering issues that emanated from the 1920s, with a view toward showing how they underwent change in the 1930s. Four overlapping foci demonstrate how change, in these two eras, was less disjunctive than evolutionary: (1) a shift in the meaning of racial uplift, (2) quest for racial authenticity, (3) efforts to increase cultural competence, and (4) the writing of literary history. By the mid-1920s, this history can be gleaned, at least initially, in the adult education movement, which had come to define its mission as not simply acquiring knowledge but applying it to problem-solving in real-life situations. Organizations like the American Association for Adult Education (AADE), the Carnegie Foundation, and the Julius Rosenwald Fund provided financial support for education that reconciled intergroup conflicts, inequities, and the marginalization of citizens. Adult education in the 1930s slowly gave way to a list of competing literary critical approaches that revised the earlier conversation taking place about the nature and purpose of performing African American literary history.

This chapter traces one of the formative transitions of the Harlem Renaissance in its literary encounter with jazz and blues culture, arguing that its aesthetic was not only shaped by the music’s vital expressive forms but also its means of production, the technical recording apparatus itself. Many Harlem Renaissance writers were motivated in their artistic efforts to preserve the folk culture they felt was rapidly being lost. To do so, they paradoxically harnessed the very recording technologies they believed were hastening the demise of folk culture. Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and others engaged with popular music and its processes of recording – its possibilities of preservation, representation, and collectivity, but also displacement and alienation – in part, as a way of understanding the craft of writing as a related technology and their own predicament as writers within commercial literary markets requiring specific kinds of raced performances.

This chapter considers Ellison’s contradictory relationship to the black writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s. While Ellison met and conversed with Alain Locke about black writing as an undergraduate at Tuskegee, and benefitted directly from mentoring by African American creative forebears like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright after his move to New York in the late 1930s, he also expressly distanced himself from these figures later. In chapters like 1963-64’s canonical “The World and the Jug,” for example, Ellison emphasizes the influence of various white modernists like T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and André Malraux as he downplays his debt to Hughes and Wright, both of whom bookended the politicized aesthetic of the Renaissance. As a counterpoint, I consider Ellison stylistic points of resemblance with these earlier black modernists to suggest a more substantial genealogical connection than Ellison himself admitted at times in his own rhetorical self-fashioning.

Conceptualizing “black space” as both human and spatial geographies enables a linkage of New Negro modernism and southern realities, a linkage that in turn foregrounds the importance of the American South in the making of the literary and cultural production of the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance. The American South contributed literally and figuratively to the burgeoning critical and cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance or the New Negro Movement, and not merely in terms of contemporary writers and artists of southern birth but especially in terms of historical customs, traditions, and practices of racial segregation, discrimination, and trauma underpinning the modern race writing appearing in magazines, journals, and newspapers during the 1920s.

In Chapter 4, I consider how poets reconfigured the long-play stereo album and challenged the spatial limits of the printed book. In particular, I turn to Langston Hughes’s LP book Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961) and Amiri Baraka’s poetry album It’s Nation Time (1972), recorded for Motown’s Black Forum label, in order to discuss how the stereo LP opened new black sonic spaces at a contentious moment in history. While many poets made recordings during the 1960s, what distinguishes these works is their ongoing dialogue with the specificities of stereo sound, the LP, and sound in its spatial dimensions. Part of what is radical about a stereophonic poetic is the way that it opens a space within a space -- one that sits neither inside nor outside history.