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This article analyzes the poetry collection "Color de orisha" by Pura del Prado, a Cuban poet of the diaspora. Although her work has received few critical-literary studies, her value as a continuation of black-themed poetry in Cuba is recognized. The objective of the article is to assess the figure of Pura del Prado and her contribution to national lyricism. Pura del Prado was a Cuban poet who was part of the Artistic and Literary Circle Heredia in Santiago de Cuba. Her poetic work was published in magazines such as Carteles and Vanidades, and some of her poems were compiled in anthologies. During the 1950s, she actively participated in the cultural life of Santiago de Cuba and collaborated with various publications. After 1959, she left Cuba and settled in the United States. Her work falls within the neoromanticism and black-themed poetry movements. The text mentions the lack of studies dedicated to Pura del Prado's poetic activity abroad, but highlights some research that approaches her work from different perspectives. These studies recognize her ability to break with the molds of neoromanticism and her interest in black-themed poetry. However, it is considered that these analyses are superficial and do not define the uniqueness of her work. Additionally, the text mentions the editorial silence that her work suffered after leaving Cuba in 1959. On the other hand, it discusses the presence of black poetry in Cuban literature since its origins and mentions some factors that contributed to its emergence in the period from 1923 to 1958. This poetry addresses topics such as customs, religions, and the hardships suffered by black people, as well as music and the magical-religious aspect. The text analyzes Pura del Prado's poetry collection "Color de orisha," which stands out for being a work of Afro-descendant poetry in Cuba. The book merges the themes of African religion, Catholic faith, and the immigrant experience. Each poem is dedicated to a deity of the Yoruba pantheon and uses colors as titles to symbolically represent the corresponding orisha. The author draws inspiration from Lydia Cabrera's book to describe the rituals, plants, and colors of the Yoruba religion. Additionally, chromatism is used, and musical rhythms and dialectal expressions are incorporated into the poems. The work reflects the author's identification with enslaved black people and their religiosity in the diaspora. The text analyzes Pura del Prado's black poetry, highlighting her identity and her connection with her country of origin, Cuba. Despite writing from abroad, Pura maintains ties with her homeland and expresses longing for the abandoned country. Her work is considered an important part of Cuban literature and showcases transculturation and mestizaje as artistic motifs. Additionally, her ability to break with neoromantic molds and her contribution to Cuban black-themed poetry are highlighted. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores some of the ways in which contemporary poets are tracing the roots and routes via which objects have come to, and continue to, reside within the walls of the museum. Focusing on poetic mediations of British Museums — on the Museum of London, the Manchester Museum, and the British Museum — the article analyses the works of Bernardine Evaristo, Inua Ellams, and Daljit Nagra. These poetic mediations can be read as literary archaeologies — as the concept is used by Evaristo — which speak to the histories, movements, and contemporaneous moments of colonial encounter that take place within the institution of the museum. The article moves to consider the way in which literary archaeologies might chart both a history of migration — looking at Bernardine Evaristo's The Emperor's Babe — and the migration of objects which are displayed in museums in Britain — with a focus on Inua Ellams's poem Tusk — before going on to examine the museum as institution, as it is presented in Daljit Nagra's collection British Museum. Setting these distinct, but complementary poetic interventions alongside one another, the article asks: how do these literary archaeologies respond to the histories and present-day stories told by — and about — British museums in the twenty-first century? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay interprets the poem “Poem” by Langston Hughes drawing both from biographical material about the author (e.g., the biopic Looking for Langston) and from political writing about queer friendship and solidarity, notably Sara Ahmed, José Esteban Muñoz, and Judith Butler. Instead of engaging in a close reading that tries to do justice to the queerness of the “historical” Langston Hughes, the text tries to identify the power of the poem in providing suggestions of how marginalized individuals can challenge societal norms and open spaces for alternative modes of being. Referring to Michel Foucault’s ideas of gay friendship as a disruptive mode of resistance to existing structures of power, the essay develops a more nuanced idea of how Hughes’s poetry subscribes to a poiesis of susceptibility. In other words, the article argues that the poem allows for a shift away from the dominant mode of subject-formation within oppressive norms by presenting utopian speech and new modes of interrelation, namely Black, male, and queer friendship. Hence, it rethinks how those to whom the future does not belong can try to reclaim it by creating spheres where potentiality, difference, and otherness can exist and individuals can make themselves intelligible who were previously unrecognizable. Poetry functions in this process as tool that builds and reconfigures the frames of susceptibility allowing for friendships and softness that found no place before or outside of those.

This article discusses Wanda Coleman's poetry in terms of two interconnected categories which launched the studies of black literature by Craig Werner: "integrity" and "extension". These categories are assumed to correspond to the standard critical perception of Coleman's oeuvre as content- and form-oriented, respectively, where the former pre-conditions the latter. However, the implemented concepts not only demonstrate how well-acquainted the poet was with the everyday ghetto lives of poor black women and with multiple forms of discrimination against them ("integrity"), but also reveal her experimental attitude to language and to formal dimensions of poetry ("extension"). Also, a close reading of Coleman's protracted series of American jazz sonnets and her "Retro Rogue Anthology" poems reveals that this formal strategy extended her attention to a new subject matter (i.e., history, culture, and black identity), perceived and presented from a collective black perspective. Eventually, Coleman's re-writing of white classic poems bears the marks of the strategy of Signifyin(g) combined with the iconoclastic tradition pioneered by Friedrich Nietzsche. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Black posthumanist theory, I consider the related but discrete areas of performance, poetics, and audiovisual practice, contextualizing and examining the works of exploratory poet Claudia Rankine, Pulitzer Prize-winning hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar, and poet and performer Douglas Kearney. Borrowing from and extending Louis Chude-Sokei's ideas of "Black technopoetics" as "the self-conscious interaction of Black thinkers, writers, and sound producers with technology," I focus on how Rankine, Lamar, and Kearney situate Black subjectivity in networks of technological and televisual mediation. With regard to Rankine, I focus on her "Situations"—short video collaborations with her partner John Lucas—and contextualizes these with reference to David Marriott and his analysis of media and surveillance. I then consider Kendrick Lamar's music videos and their practice of sampling and self-reference within the context of Alexander Weheliye's and Paul Miller/aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid's posthumanist theories of the voice. I conclude by attending to the work of Douglas Kearney, who combines expressive typographic forms and unconventional vocalizations in his performance practice. These analyses are situated against a backdrop of white-supremacist violence and the media spectacle of Black death—what Marriot calls "infotainment"—and I arrive at a speculative conclusion regarding the intersections of very recent AI and historical archives of Black life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of Matthew E. Henry's Teaching While Black. Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2020. Matthew E. Henry's slim, searing first book of poems, Teaching While Black, is composed of situations or "teaching moments" that have occured throughout his life and particularly in his career as a Black teacher at mostly white and privileged schools. Particularly timely after the recent police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and others, the poems, and the moments each represents, highlight the intersection of race, class, and gender politics, exploring the conflicted meanings of place, position, and identity for a Black educator. These are challenging, insightful, and passionate poems that would be ideal reading for courses focused on these issues, particularly in conjunction with the BLM protests that coincide with the collection's publication and with helping students both to understand and resist the received positions that society, or educational institutions assign them.

M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 book-length poem Zong! represents maritime materialities below the sea’s surface in relation to aesthetic geographies of the sea in the aftermath of slavery as an abyss of loss, thereby extending modernist aesthetics while offering a strategic and revisionary response to male-centered modernist writing. Keen attention into the sea as an innovating and renewing source reveals that the poem imagines the sea as a literal, formal, and thematic agent for the “decontamination” of language—which, Philip maintains, is contaminated by imperialism—and of the received history about slavery. The poem focuses its investigation on the case of the 1781 Zong massacre and the Gregson v. Gilbert maritime insurance case that arose in its wake. Zong! mourns the massacre of 150 Africans who were thrown overboard so that owners of the slave ship could collect insurance money on lost “cargo”. In conversation with Caribbean poets and thinkers, such as Grace Nichols, and African oral traditions, the poem explores forms of memory that go beyond the non-history officially afforded to the enslaved and their descendants. Throughout the poem, the sea is a site of decontamination through which Zong! stages its attempt to recover the unrecoverable. While many scholars have understandably focused on the events aboard the ship, a small number of ecocritical readings have highlighted the poem’s engagement with the materiality of the sea. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism and black feminist theories of the human, this article will discuss the sea as a material geography, going deeper to investigate the poem’s rarely discussed focus on biological and chemical materiality as juxtaposed to representations of black women’s flesh, arguing that it functions as a feminist provocation to both human exceptionalism and the racial boundaries of the human.

Copyright of Revista Cuadernos de Literatura del Caribe e Hispanoamerica is the property of Revista Cuadernos de Literatura del Caribe e Hispanoamerica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on the impact of Dr. Joanne V. Gabbin's work in fostering Black poetry through the establishment of the Furious Flower Poetry Center. Topics include the Center's role in celebrating the legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks and other Black literary figures, its efforts to provide opportunities for emerging Black poets to connect with established voices, and its creation of a unique archive and familial community dedicated to preserving and advancing Black poetic traditions.

The article discusses literature by black writers and mentions topics such as modern poetry by black authors. Poets including J.S. Mill, T.S. Elliot and Northrop Frye are mentioned. Topics discussed include sensuality, eroticism in poetry and feminist writers. Other topics such as racism and violence are also mentioned.

Copyright of Estudos Avancados is the property of Instituto de Estudos Avancados da Universidade de Sao Paulo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article argues that love and justice are interlocking themes that undergird and motivate the poetry and activism of the Black lesbian feminist Pat Parker. Parker was a prolific working-class poet, a committed Black lesbian feminist, and an international trailblazer whose poems, like her famous “Womanslaughter” discussed in this article, document the many injustices that Black women endured in an anti-Black, rabidly homophobic, and patriarchal U.S. during the last decades of the twentieth century. In a political moment where righteous cries of #BlackLivesMatter are heard across the United States I use this article to remind us all of the historical importance that Black lesbians played and continue to play in the struggles of anti-racist justice in America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

M. NourbeSe Philip's 2008 book-length poem Zong! represents maritime materialities below the sea's surface in relation to aesthetic geographies of the sea in the aftermath of slavery as an abyss of loss, thereby extending modernist aesthetics while offering a strategic and revisionary response to male-centered modernist writing. Keen attention into the sea as an innovating and renewing source reveals that the poem imagines the sea as a literal, formal, and thematic agent for the "decontamination" of language—which, Philip maintains, is contaminated by imperialism—and of the received history about slavery. The poem focuses its investigation on the case of the 1781 Zong massacre and the Gregson v. Gilbert maritime insurance case that arose in its wake. Zong! mourns the massacre of 150 Africans who were thrown overboard so that owners of the slave ship could collect insurance money on lost "cargo". In conversation with Caribbean poets and thinkers, such as Grace Nichols, and African oral traditions, the poem explores forms of memory that go beyond the non-history officially afforded to the enslaved and their descendants. Throughout the poem, the sea is a site of decontamination through which Zong! stages its attempt to recover the unrecoverable. While many scholars have understandably focused on the events aboard the ship, a small number of ecocritical readings have highlighted the poem's engagement with the materiality of the sea. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism and black feminist theories of the human, this article will discuss the sea as a material geography, going deeper to investigate the poem's rarely discussed focus on biological and chemical materiality as juxtaposed to representations of black women's flesh, arguing that it functions as a feminist provocation to both human exceptionalism and the racial boundaries of the human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which topics within the issue are discussed which includes Black writings, racial politics and Black poetry.