This chapter presents contemporary African American theater and drama as a democratic art form that addresses social injustice and racial inequalities in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Obama presidency. The plays The White Card by Claudia Rankine and Fairview: A Play by Jackie Sibblies Drury are discussed in light of recent developments in Black performance theory and with regard to Jacques Rancière’s argument on the democratic and egalitarian potential of theatrical performance. Both plays work toward a revision of how racial identities are configured in what Rancière has called the “distribution of the sensible.” The White Card reflects on the theatrical representation of police brutality and its mediation through photography and art. Fairview provides an example of how contemporary playwrights elaborate on a tradition of actor–spectator interaction in African American theater as a means for destabilizing the social allocation of racial and spatial positions in society. In this sense, Rankine and Drury transform African American theater into an oppositional site that challenges the configuration of racial discourses in a variety of contexts and instances.

The overlap of poetry and essay in modern and contemporary American writing is the focus of this chapter. Covering the literary manifesto, essays on poetry, and the rise of the modern poet-critic, the chapter explores examples of formal and procedural essaying in postmodern and contemporary poetry. These include construction and deconstruction of a speaker-subject, theoretical experimentation, translation, documentary, and social critique. The chapter reflects on the position of the subjective "I" in the essay, lyric and experimental poetry, and hybrids of these and dwells in its conclusion on the problems of form and process in the lyric essay or essayistic poem.

This chapter traces the development in the United States of the lyric essay (and, peripherally, essayistic poetry), with a focus on three contemporary writers: Anne Carson, Annie Dillard, and Maggie Nelson. Beginning with competing definitions of this hybrid genre whose contours are not always easy to discern, the chapter describes the role of American creative writing programs and the poetry classroom in the emergence of this special type of writing, which has gained ground in the early years of the twenty-first century. Examples from the lyric essays of Carson, Dillard, and Nelson are then read closely in an attempt to isolate the features unique to this genre celebrated by John D’Agata and Deborah Tall in their manifesto "New Terrain: The Lyric Essay" (1997).

This chapter explores some of the new developments, trends, and movements that have characterized contemporary American poetry in the period since 2000, a period in which poetry grapples with a tumultuous, rapidly changing culture and continues to become increasingly diverse. The chapter focuses on three of the most important developments: the collapse of the old binary opposition between mainstream and experimental and the emergence of a new hybrid mode; a new openness to remix, sampling, and the use of found language and documentary materials in poetry associated with movements such as Conceptual poetry and Flarf, which can be seen, in part, as a response to the rise of the digital age and new questions about originality and appropriation it has ushered in; and a resurgence of politically engaged, formally adventurous poetry, especially by poets of color, in the era of Obama and Trump. The chapter focuses on representative poets, including Jorie Graham, Dean Young, Kenneth Goldsmith, Tracy K. Smith, Robin Coste Lewis, Claudia Rankine, Ross Gay, Danez Smith, and Terrance Hayes.

This chapter traces multiple genealogies for the contemporary “lyric essay,” from the American memoir boom of the 1990s to the experimental writings of language poets, practitioners of postcolonial and Black diasporic thought such as Édouard Glissant and M. NourbeSe Philip, and writers who combine lyric and essayistic writing such as Claudia Rankine and Bhanu Khapil.