Pan-Islamism represents a radical search for Islamic unity and empowerment in the modern world. Today, Jihadi Salafists are the most aggressive proponents of pan-Islamic solidarity, yet paradoxically they are divided by intense ideological debates about sectarianism, anti-Muslim violence, and the need for a territorial state, rendering their movement ineffective.

What drives the increasingly violent impulses of Hindu nationalism in India? This chapter emphasizes the abyss between, on the one hand, its anxieties about Hindu minoritization and territorial dismemberment and, on the other, its retrotopian visions about revitalizing a purported Hindu golden age.

Sikh warrior culture is rooted in the spirit of “speaking truth to power,” the Sikh notion of sovereignty, the idea of defensive warfare and the institution of the Khalsa. Its two integral features are hymns of surrender to an ineffable One and tales of excruciating but somehow gratifying martyrdom.

This chapter challenges the Gandhian narrative that Hinduism preaches peace. It argues that Hinduism is composed of many strands of thought that include both nonviolent traditions and martial violence.

The contemporary poet Susan Briante’s 2016 volume The Market Wonders reinvents a poetic strategy employed by the poet Muriel Rukeyser in her 1938 documentary poetic sequence “The Book of the Dead.” Influenced by Rukeyser’s placement of a newspaper stock price readout within a poem sequence about industrial catastrophe and labor exploitation, Briante crafts an approximation of a stock ticker that runs across the bottom of her poems. “I put some of my life, my love, in a space between numbers, between the values against which they are judged,” Briante writes in her poem, “December 19 – The Dow Is Closed”; “I have set a ticker (tick, tick, tick) like Muriel Rukeyser does in ‘The Book of the Dead’” (71). Through such repurposing, Briante reimagines, and thus rereads, Rukeyser’s formal strategies amid a moment when ideas about poetry’s relationship to political commitment remain in flux: The Market Wonders was written in response to the 2008 economic recession and the consolidation of mass political movements such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and it was published concomitant with the election of Donald Trump. As Michael Dowdy has pointed out, several recent poetry volumes addressing the current landscape of political, economic, and ecological crisis cite Rukeyser as a model (157). I begin with The Market Wonders, and with Briante’s citation of Rukeyser, to suggest that Rukeyser’s Depression-era left milieu has literary historical and critical consequences for thinking about the intersections between poetry and politics beyond influence per se. Briante’s reappropriation of Rukeyser reveals how the composition and interpretation of poems is embedded in political, economic, and institutional realities, and it suggests that understanding the limits and possibilities of poetry reading in the present requires a grappling with the past.

American politics has long been shaped by a desire to make the nation a sort of rock-ribbed utopia. In the twentieth century this desire became a “jurismania” – a compulsion to catch every tremor of social life in a net of legal “rationality” – that criminalized so much of life that unprecedented levels of incarceration, particularly of minorities, were the result (Campos vii, 98). A critical moment in the rise of mass incarceration came in 1986, when President Ronald Reagan demanded that the country which “divine providence” itself had established be saved from the threat to it posed by drug abuse (“Address to the Nation”). Invoking a comic-strip version of the nation’s history that glossed over slavery, Jim Crow, and the negative impacts on the poor of his own efforts to dismantle “big government,” Reagan averred that “[w]e Americans have never been morally neutral against any form of tyranny” (Gray 110). Reagan’s rock-ribbed prose is a reminder of the value of the prismatic language of poets – especially those who have been caught up in the legislation written for comic-strip reality rather than the real thing.

Critics and poets who talk about wit most often describe the eighteenth century, the decades of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith, of discursive, pointed, end-stopped couplets. “True wit is nature to advantage dressed; / What oft is thought but ne’er so well expressed,” as Pope concluded in “An Essay on Criticism” (1711). Eighteenth-century wit meant a way for superior, well-read equals to speak and write with one another, a means of communication that displayed humor, intelligence, and proportion, even calm; it could also mean indirection, double meanings, humorous ways to say or imply what a poet could not highlight or say outright, from a monarch’s indiscretions to the ridiculousness of an entire social system.

During the 1970s a new mode of avant-garde practice, language writing, emerged as a reaction to what was perceived as the “cookie-cutter” workshop poem propagated in MFA programs. Though generally characterized by antiexpressionist values (e.g., nonlinear syntax, agrammatical structures, and the demotion of semantic coherence), language writing was initially a loose coalition of writers practicing outside the MFA workshop models prevalent in academia. However, as language writing began to crystallize around social formations (the high school and college friendships among the key language writers Barrett Watten, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, and Carla Harryman), political values (the expansion of antiwar protests against the Vietnam conflict into Marxist critiques of capitalist imperialism and colonialism), and militant aesthetics (the “turn to language”), the movement was criticized by different camps of poets and critics. Representing both “mainstream” poetics associated with academia and “marginal” poetics associated with racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, these poets and critics viewed the “turn to language,” on the one hand, as a turning away from traditional poetic values and, on the other hand, as an abandonment of social and cultural crises whose urgency seemed to demand the most transparent, direct, and accessible language. While the poetics (and to a lesser extent, the politics) of San Francisco poets like Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, and Robin Blaser set important precedents for the language writers, the latter understood their practice as something more than just a return to, and extension of, the 1950s and 1960s Cold War anarchist politics of the Beat writers. The turn also represented a reconception of the relationship between politics and poetics at the height of the Vietnam conflict, which for many of the language writers represented another stage of the Cold War. Theorizing that anarchism tended to dovetail with American individualism, as evident in the “do your own thing” philosophy of hippie gurus like Timothy Leary, Watten and Silliman, in particular, widely considered the cofounders of language writing, reached beyond the Beats in order to rehabilitate the experimental writings and Marxist politics of, among others, the Objectivist poets, who had started writing and publishing in the 1930s. Louis Zukofsky’s and George Oppen’s combination of innovative writing and social critique made them especially significant to Watten and Silliman. Thus the more linear narrative forms deployed by Objectivists such as Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, and Lorine Niedecker led to their relative neglect by Watten and Silliman despite their avowal of leftist politics. And while the Objectivists interrogated their alienation from mainstream America as a function, in part, of covert (when not overt) anti-Semitism, the language writers, by and large, ignored or marginalized this aspect of their precursors’ experiences, blind spots replicated in relationship to the racial, gender, and sexual orientation upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s.

Writing at the precise moment of the stock market “crash” of 1929, and the onset of the Great Depression, the philosopher and public intellectual, John Dewey declared flatly: “Economic determinism is now a fact, not a theory.” Ours is a “money culture,” he said (Dewey 119, 9), simply stating as anthropological fact what is our cultural experience. After the crash, economic determinism and therefore economic reform, if not revolution, seemed more than ever the key to the vicissitudes of modernity. It was the crash, critic Edmund Wilson noted, which made him turn to Das Kapital (Wilson 495). Kenneth Burke, at the same time, for the same reasons, found himself taking “avid notes on corporate devices whereby business enterprisers had contrived to build up empires by purely financial manipulations” (Burke 214). On the Left, Louis Zukofsky’s “Song 27” (1934) explicitly directed readers to Capital, Chapter 3, “Money or the Circulation of Commodities,” and other passages from Marx (Zukofsky 58–61). On the Right, Ezra Pound included two pages of quotes from Capital, Chapter 10, “The Working Day,” in Canto XXXIII (33/162–163).

Digital poetry emerged in tandem with advances in the computer sciences in the mid-twentieth century, although we can trace its experimental impulses to earlier literary traditions. As Dani Spinosa argues, “digital poetry has its roots in a history of print-based avant-garde” (x). The recombinant and nonlinear conditions of electronic literature, broadly conceived, have led some scholars to attend to modernist works by writers and media visionaries such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Bob Brown in a search for the origins of the procedural play in contemporary innovative writing. “Early digital poems,” as Christopher Funkhouser notes, “can be conceptually interpreted as searching for their essence or as striving to make their essence apparent, as did modernist endeavors” (3). Media theorists, such as Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, and Lev Manovich understood the innovations of early media as cornerstones in the development of the digital revolution. The modernist transition to new communication and media technologies, such as cinema, radio, and the gramophone, fostered faster transmissions of information that in turn influenced novel approaches to structuring narrative time, visual language, and reading practices. Bob Brown’s 1930 proposal for a mechanized reading machine offers an intriguing example of this collision between media and literature. Invoking the “talkies” or sound films, Brown’s reading device proposed to deliver “readies” or a ticker-tape stream of prose or poetry to a viewer, thereby efficiently transmitting a visual spectacle of information. For Brown, the machine would “revitalize” an “interest in the Optical Art of Writing” and thus merge the act of reading with the technological innovations that were already modernizing society (27). With this background in mind, it remains a useful exercise to apprehend the radical experimentation of contemporary electronic literature alongside the visual, technological, and formal innovations of earlier avant-garde movements, including Futurism and Dadaism, as well as later literary groups, such as Oulipo, Fluxus, and language writing.

In “Pollen Fossil Record,” the final section of Myung Mi Kim’s Commons (2002), a poem titled “duration” evokes the elusive process by which a lyric poem inventories the material traces of perception, of expression, and of history. The task of the lyric, always seemingly impossible, is to translate the multivalent, multidirectional vectors of living into the shape of a sound, a line, an imaginary articulation. In the poem’s closing lines, the speaker offers us an operational definition of transcultural agency that I would like to use as a guiding principle for this chapter: “The poem may be said to reside in disrupted, dilated, circulatory spaces, and it is the / means by which one notates this provisional location that evokes and demonstrates / agency – the ear by which the prosody by which to calibrate the liberative potential of / writing, storehouse of the human / To probe the terms under which we denote, participate in, and speak of cultural / and human practices – / To mobilize the notion of our responsibility to one another in social space” (Kim 111). What would it mean to treat accountability, as opposed to the loaded pressures of intimacy or the unmanageable demands of consensus, as the key paradigm of relation within a commons? And how have American poets variously participated in this “responsibility to one another in social space” across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Indeed, this is no small feat in a historical period marked by ceaseless empire-building, massive immigration, global warfare, expanding routes of trade and commerce, ecological collapses, the rise of mass incarceration, and increasing wealth disparities – phenomena that have unevenly impacted people of color throughout the United States and led many to cling more strongly to a sense of community based in self-recognition. And yet multiethnic American poets have continually shown us that thinking beyond the ideologies of modern conditions of colonialism, systemic racism, and global capitalism happens through a shared sense of responsibility to alternative modes of assembly empowered by dialogic discourse and cross-cultural exchange. If we think of poems as formal microcosms of the cultural practices and political networks of marginalized communities, we can begin to see how transcultural agency depends as much on dissonance as it does on harmony. Any poem that holds the potential to mediate encounters, at times reciprocal and at other times violent, that transgress national, political, and linguistic borders calls on us to become sonically attuned to multiple sites of exchange, traversal, and substitution at once. For Kim’s speaker, agency denotes neither imposing force nor instrumentalist control but rather an “ear” that is sensitive to the “disrupted, dilated, circulatory” elements of culture – the ability, in other words, to flow with currents of meaning, of value, and of relation as they ripple across space and time.

Spoken word refers to poetic performance that relies on or emphasizes the aspects of its construction that must be heard, rather than read, to be fully experienced and appreciated. Factors like intonation, volume, and audience participation are aesthetic elements that might be of some consequence on the page, but they are central to the construction and performance of spoken word. Any discussion about hip hop’s aesthetic qualities and sociopolitical weight requires substantive engagement with Black spoken word and performance poetry. What follows is an exploration of the political resonances that emerge from interactions – both historical and into the present day – between hip-hop music and Black spoken word performance.

Noting the lack of poetry reviews in newspapers and the rise of the novel as the preeminent literary genre in the United States, Gioia, writing in The Atlantic, worries that an insulated subculture has taken custody of poetry: “Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.” Contra Gioia, the success of US poet laureate Robert Pinsky’s 1997 “Favorite Poem Project,” to which, as the project website reports, “18,000 Americans wrote in to share their favorite poems – Americans from ages 5 to 97, from every state, representing a range of occupations, kinds of education, and backgrounds” – suggests a strong undercurrent of enthusiastic poetry readers.