This chapter examines the relationship between poems and the commodities that structure both our intimate lives and the vast social geographies of the globe. If the content of a poem must often be discovered through interpretative work, reading between the lines of its figurative expressions and other such devices, the commodity, too, is a form of appearance which conceals its origins in labor and the exploitation of that labor. Beginning with this correspondence, and analyzing examples by Bernadette Mayer, Claude McKay, Keston Sutherland, and others, the chapter maps out several ways in which poems both present and negate the commodity. It discusses the poetic representation of labor itself as a commodity, of nonremunerative care work, of the factory and global commodity chains, and of the circulation of commodities through colonial networks. In conclusion, the chapter argues that learning to read the poem is inseparable from learning to read the commodity, for in both cases, the reader's success lies in the ability to re-suture the text to, rather than rescue it from, its worldly net.

The most familiar way of conjoining religion and queerness in America is proscriptive. This is so despite the vivid presence of non-normative sexualities in the sacred stories of nearly all religions and the formative labors of queer-identified persons in their ranks. In invocations of American religion the default religion is likely to be Christian; the default Christianity, Protestant; the primary office of religion, morality; and the morality in question, sexual morality. In this way, the very category of religion in America is shaped by the pathologizing of non-normative sexualities. If to embrace queer lives is to depart from faithful Christian witness, then all departures from right religion bear the taint of suspect desire. But exile is not the only place of queerness in American religious lives, as literary history amply confirms. By what paths did early American texts come to identify religion as heteronormative? And how has a more generative religious imagination of queerness come to shape American literature? This chapter tracks these questions by moving between Puritan invocations of queerness as civic and spiritual threat and later rejoinders in American letters.

This chapter reexamines the role urbanization played in the emergence of literary modernism in the US. The development of the skyscraper in the 1880s and increasing, and increasingly diverse, migration patterns at the turn of the twentieth century transformed Chicago and New York into important economic and cultural centers, where new literary voices and new modes of literary expression soon flourished. This chapter explores the significance of the skyscraper, that most American of architectural forms, on modernist poetry and prose fiction, as well as the ways cities enabled authors to create and navigate complex, intersecting networks of literary community. Harriet Monroe and Claude McKay serve as exemplary representatives of the modernist literary cultures that took shape in – and sometimes between – Chicago and New York, respectively.

Beginning with Claude McKay’s “The Harlem Dancer”—in which the national space of Harlem opens up to the Caribbean from which its eponymous dancer has likely emigrated—this chapter reads the mass migration resulting from the structures of imperial capital as the determining social ground of modernist literature. Indeed, modernism registered, to an unprecedented degree, in both formal and thematic terms, an early moment of what we have now come to call globalization. But if modernist form betrays a complicity with globalization, in its persistence representation of the way national literary spaces open themselves up to cultural materials from elsewhere, it also levels a consistent critique of both capitalism and nationalism, a critique that unites its left and right wings. Modernist texts thus tend to separate economic and cultural globalization, critiquing the first, while advocating for the second, even as they demonstrate their deep inter-relationship.

Poetry makes nothing happen, except when it does. The sharpness of this barb may derive, strangely, from the fact that poetry keeps pretending to make things happen, keeps availing itself of a didactic, performative, and apostrophic language hailing from a world in which such techniques were for better and worse the very stuff of social reproduction, and where words could kill. Poetry is therefore the literary mode most practically suited to revolution, the literary practice that coincides most clearly with the concerted activity of revolutionaries in the throes of crisis. Resistance, insurgency, and revolution produce their novels after the fact but their poetry, often, right away. Inverting the scales of the systems of genre we inherit from Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson, poetry’s power turns out to derive from a strange literality.

This chapter follows the lasting influence of Harlem Renaissance writers on Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry, even after the 1967 Fisk Writers’ conference. Specifically, it turns to Riot (1969) to think about its continuity with the poetry most closely associated with the New Negro Renaissance. This is not done for the sake of periodizing Brooks as part of the earlier generation, nor to detach her later work from its formation in and of the Black Arts Movement. Rather, the chapter traces in Brooks’s work the development of a tradition of Black migratory poetics: poetry that formally and imaginatively enacts human transnational movement. Brooks’s migratory poetry illuminates and at times dismantles violence and constraint, but also turns its back on borders, attempting to find, create, define, and take up space beyond the nation state. As such, Riot also provides a key pivot or transition between Black modernist poetics and our contemporary moment in poetry.

This chapter examines the notion of home-shock (as opposed to shell-shock) in five works of American fiction from the 1920s. Each work contains a veteran tortured not by war but by the circumstances of his homecoming. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby returns from his heroic overseas service to a nation that seems content to let him starve, the pivotal moment in his transformation from earnest student of self-help to criminal bootlegger. Harold Krebs, the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home,” is infantilized by his mother and ignored by his community, which neither understands nor respects his combat experience. Bayard Sartoris and Henry Winston—former wartime aviators featured in, respectively, William Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust and Elliott White Springs’s Leave Me with a Smile—each suffer from paralyzing survivor’s guilt, a malady that no one in their Southern settings is equipped to treat. For African-American protagonists, subject to racial violence and oppression, home-shock is even more intense, as illustrated by the ironic fate visited upon Frederick Taylor, the doleful hero of Claude McKay’s “The Soldier’s Return,” set in a small Georgia town. This former soldier winds up on a chain gang after ignoring an edict that prohibits black veterans from wearing their uniforms in public.

Language has long been acknowledged as a site of contestation in the Creole-anglophone Caribbean. English has, traditionally, been the exclusive language of both literary text and critical analysis. Conversely, the various Creoles of the Caribbean are not generally recognized as languages, let alone appropriate modes of literary expression. Debates about this contentious issue became a major flashpoint in the 1950s with the publication of V. S. Reid’s New Day (1949) and Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1953) in which Creole-speaking characters take centre stage. These debates gathered impetus in the 1970s with the publication of Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey, Mervyn Morris’ positioning of Louise Bennett as a ‘serious’ writer following the publication of her volume Jamaica Labrish (1966), and Kamau Brathwaite’s 1970 establishment of the journal Savacou, all of which engaged the vernacular as a literary language. The growing influence of sociopolitical eruptions such as the Rastafari movement and Black Power also signified influential developments in the thinking about language. Through an examination of poetry and prose, the chapter assesses the significance of the historical debates about language beginning in the eighteenth century and concluding with a brief discussion of the legacy of these contestations in the present.

Modernists of the African diaspora rethink liberal governance after 1919 through subtle critique (as in René Maran’s Batouala), through direct engagement (as in the Pan-African Congresses organized by W. E. B. Du Bois), and through diasporic romance (as in Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth). The chapter commences with the “new internationalism” claimed for African-American art by Alain Locke in 1919, and ends with the global response to the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the occasion for Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth and wide range of other engaged poetry and prose. These and other diasporic African modernisms respond to the paternalism of post-Wilsonian rhetoric by reworking the narratives of reproduction, education, and labor that subtended liberal internationalist rhetoric and continued neo-imperial rule. Connecting the global response to 1919 to Pan-African aesthetics and Harlem Renaissance internationalism allows us to articulate a distinctive black diasporic response to interwar liberal order, a modernism attuned to what Du Bois called the “global color-line.”