This chapter traces the movement of slam and spoken-word poetry from a subjugated and lesser art form to an established and valid one in the early twenty-first century, while suggesting that these institutionalizing forces and desires can be caught up in anti-Blackness. The emergence of HBO’s Russell Simmons presents Def Poetry Jam in 2002 offered a highly produced and stylized televisual marker of contemporary spoken word and slam success, centering the young Black poetic voice in way that popularized a particular defiant Black aesthetic and had the general cultural consciousness assuming that slam was indeed a Black thing. The emergence of a new “quiet style” in locations such as the Minneapolis/St. Paul literary scene and the multimedia company Button Poetry can be seen, in contrast, as advancing the ideal of the disembodied performer who, through the rejection of theatrics, focuses on the “real” art of poetry.

A pan-Asian American poetry has been at the forefront of innovative poetics in myriad ways. This chapter foregrounds the impact the innovative legacies of the 1980s and 1990s have had on early twenty-first-century Asian American poetry. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed within Asian American letters the success of a mainstream lyricism but were also a crucial incubation period for a counter-tradition impatient with mainstream modes of poetic expression. Three major counter-modes have come to characterize some of the finest achievements of contemporary Asian American innovative poetics: a surrealist mode, pioneered by John Yau and practiced by younger poets such as Paolo Javier; a documental mode of postmodern montage, evident in the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Walter K. Lew, Myung Mi Kim, and Divya Victor; and a phenomenological mode practiced by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Sueyeun Juliette Lee.

Contemporary Native American and Indigenous poetry is disrupting, crossing, and transgressing boundaries set up by settler states. Poetic possibilities reflect the movement and motions toward seriously engaging trans-Indigenous possibilities: coming to the table already knowing that we have had ways of speaking to and with each other since time immemorial, while also remaining attuned to the cultural specificity reflected in past craftmanship of earlier published poets. Sovereign poetics are a means of enacting and expressing a self-determined justice. Janet Rogers’s Peace in Duress offers a sovereign poetics that asserts the ancestral power of creation against state policies that seeks to normalize and erase Indigenous bodies. Qwo-Li Driskill’s “Map of the Americas” creates a map in relation to body parts, affirming Indigenous embodiments that belie the conventional map we have come to recognize. Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas rethinks the settler practice of telling history and then providing an insincere apology. Other poets discussed include Heid E. Erdrich and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.

In twentieth-century US poetry, we can recognize avant-garde work for its disavowal of historic forms and genres, inclusion of nonliterary texts and materials, and centering proceduralism over craft. As we move into the twenty-first century, we can see how these practices have helped bring to light artists from marginalized communities who use these strategies to address the historic traumas and ongoing harms their people experience. However, such work has illuminated deep tensions within contemporary writing communities regarding how avant-garde practices and practitioners are received. This chapter begins with a brief study of a series of events that broke out between 2013 and 2015 around Kenneth Goldsmith’s work, in which the tensions between avant-garde practices, cultural trauma, and appropriate authorship spilled into public view. Next, it examines Douglas Kearney's and Dawn Lundy Martin’s work in the context of black pain and the excess of black signification. It closes with a discussion of how South Asian diaspora writers Bhanu Kapil and Divya Victor inventively appropriate and redefine whiteness through a process of “compositional witness.”

Twenty-first-century poetry by women demonstrates a multiplicity of perspectives, connection and loss, and continuing revolutions across gender and genre. At the outset of the twenty-first century, “gurlesque” poets such as Arielle Greenberg stress artifice and performance in a heightened, ironic attention to the gendered body on display. While gurlesque focuses on the artifice of gender performance, hip-hop and performance poetries focus on authenticity and forms of truth-telling, engaging the politics of fourth-wave feminism. After 9/11, a sense of precarity would be heightened in the new millennium through manmade crises and natural disasters. A rise in decolonizing poetics has given particular attention to the subjection of the female body of color and modes of resilience. The new millennium is perhaps best characterized by writing that is linguistically innovative and embodied, known variously as post-Language poetics, a new lyricism, or hybrid poetry. Digital technologies brought paradigmatic shifts to the ways in how poetry circulated and who could write it.

If African American poets have achieved a new kind of freedom in the twenty-first century, they have also pursued multiple styles through their modes of introspection. This broader inward-turning is continuous with the defining priorities of the Black Arts Movement, a principle that might be more aptly named self-determination. Contemporary African American poets have embraced black culture as a historical and cultural landscape to be mapped into new frontiers in order to make the individual black self and then to develop terms for the liberation of that self. These pursuits of self-examination and self-determination comprise at least four broad and overlapping realms of practice: apolitical introspection; a rethinking of African American history and heritage beyond the terms of simple affirmation; a personalized mode of collectivist protest in line with Black Arts Movement practices; and a black literary collective action enacted by the numerous African American writers collectives and workshops that have arisen since the 1960s. Poets discussed include Gregory Pardlo, Natasha Trethewey, Tyehimba Jess, Patricia Smith, Nikky Finney, Nathaniel Mackey, alongside groups such as Cave Canem and movements like #BlackPoetsSpeakOut.

This chapter examines the emergence of an emphatically anti-capitalist poetry in the decade since the global financial crash of 2008. There is a turn away from private, meditative poetry to a lyric speech that is public and willing to tackle rifts in the social body. It explores links among kinds of violence (racial, sexual, economic) and depredation (colonial, environmental) that liberal political language has tended to grasp in parallel rather than as part of a totality. Jasmine Gibson’s “Black Mass” coordinates the anguish of racial violence with on-the-ground relations between bosses and workers, sexuality, and geopolitics. Daniel Borzutzky’s The Performance of Becoming Human parallels contemporary police violence against black people with torture under Pinochet in Chile, making clear that the basis for the parallel is the global reach of capitalist accumulation. Allison Cobb’s After We All Died shows a willingness to let go of matter itself, in order to see how it de- and re-composes under conditions of capitalist crisis. Wendy Trevino’s Cruel Fiction depicts the loss of the “fictions,” including beloved ones, through which we live under capitalism.

The central purpose of this chapter is to account for a poetry of war resistance that directly engages the clandestine activities of the national security state. How do poets help us to see anew a highly mediated form of warfare that nonetheless conceals itself in the black ops, redacted docs, dark money, and classified landscapes comprising the secretive theaters of “low visibility” twenty-first-century violence? War writing has come from numerous camps of American verse over the past seventeen years; I will argue, however, its most sustained treatment appears in three overlapping communities: Middle Eastern American poetries, documentary poetics (or “docpo”), and left communist circles. Philip Metres’s Sand Opera, Solmaz Sharif’s Look, Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, Sinan Antoon’s The Baghdad Blues, and Khaled Mattawa’s Tocqueville are exemplary, as are works by Lawrence Joseph, Craig Santos Perez, Ara Shirinyan, Etel Adnan, Joshua Clover, Hilary Plum, Hayan Charara, Allison Cobb, Samuel Hazo, Anne Boyer, CAConrad, Judith Goldman, and Jena Osman, among others.

This chapter reveals the ways in which race is not incidental to tragedy’s moral and aesthetic claims, but rather central to the genre’s attention to social forces and philosophical concerns. Shakespeare’s tragedies reveal how the premodern imaginary considers race as both a mimetic, ephemeral enactment and proof of an essential, inherent difference. As opposed to being hampered by this contradiction, depictions of race often move between fluid, malleable, and unstable expressions of identity, providing a lexicon for the epistemological crisis of tragedy’s formation of subjectivity. In the genre’s epistemological exploration of subjectivity as a publicly scripted experience and a fundamentally separate, and at times inaccessible, essence, Shakespeare’s tragedies engage the multilayered, contradictory template of racial impersonation. Thus, attention to regimes and categories of race animates some of the most fundamental issues of inclusion and exclusion that the English looked to tragedy to illuminate.

This chapter explains how and why The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race would have been nearly impossible to create thirty years ago. It traces how the volume requires scholars who know not only Shakespeare’s works, the historical and cultural milieu of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries in England and Europe, and the archives that hold the historical documents from these time periods, but also the history of imperialism, alternative archives that reveal more about the various lives of people of color in the early modern world, and the history of Shakespeare’s employment in various theatrical, educational, and political moments in history – from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first century. Post-colonial studies, African American studies, critical race studies, and queer studies allow scholars to apply new methodologies to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

African American actresses apparently appeared in Shakespeare productions for New York’s African Company in 1821. But after the suppression of the company and for the rest of the century the only other records that seem to survive of black actresses’ public Shakespearean performances describe recitals of speeches from the plays. Despite the recognized talent of two later black Shakespearean elocutionists, Henrietta Vinton Davis and Adrienne McLean Herndon, neither ever appeared in a full Shakespeare production – a prohibition pointing to the belief that black women were manifestly incapable of embodying Shakespearean meanings. Such representational policing operated within the period’s violently reactionary anti-blackness, and both actresses fashioned responses to it, with Davis eventually leaving the stage altogether for pan-African political organizing with Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association. Herndon, however, began a tradition of Shakespeare productions at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), soliciting new audiences and authorizing black women as Shakespeareans.

Black embodiment has dominated Shakespeare and early modern race research, allowing whiteness too often to go unremarked upon. While the importance of this work cannot be overvalued, this particular focus has not just elided the necessity of thinking about whiteness but has, paradoxically, risked centering whiteness in an uncritical fashion. It’s imperative, however, that we bring critical race and critical white studies to bear on the work of Shakespeare as well as that of his fellow playwrights: The whiteness of humanity as figured in “white people” emerges as one of the most articulated subjects in the early modern period and one that is being fully “discovered” and exploited. It’s critical we understand the white racialization of the early modern stage (especially as the site of embodiment) and Shakespeare’s specific contributions to it, if we seek to understand the making of “white people” in modernity and in our own contemporary moment.

This essay examines the pervasive use of racist humor in Shakespeare’s comedies through stereotypical characters, exoticism, scapegoating, and ethnic slurs. While we may consider the ways in which Shakespeare’s comedies at times question or critique racist attitudes, ultimately the essay encourages readers to acknowledge and to wrestle with the racist language of the plays. The essay offers readers tools with which to identify and analyze racist humor in Shakespeare’s comedies, and to understand the role of racist humor in the social construction of race and the production of stigmatized groups.