Four narratives by Black women – Phyllis Montana-Leblanc’s Not Just the Levees Broke, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s A Kind of Freedom, and Kionna Walker LeMalle’s Behind the Waterline – each offer counterstories and counterhistories against singular, fixed ways of articulating what the cataclysm of Hurricane Katrina meant and means. To contextualize these narratives in intersecting theories of trauma, displacement, home, violence, and Southern Black Womanhood is to see the high stakes often hidden by facile, dominant representations of this territory in shopworn tropes of “resilience” and “soulfulness” and “entertainment.”

This introduction lays out the primary thematic concerns of the collection, drawing attention to the insider/outsider dynamics at play in New Orleans literature as well as the legibility and illegibility of certain literary archives from the city’s past and present, including literary materials related to Spanish colonial Louisiana, Asian-American Louisiana, and underappreciated Black New Orleans authors. It offers suggestions for pedagogically useful linkages between various themes and chapters from the volume, and it ends with suggestions for new lines of scholarly inquiry, tracing the ways musician autobiographies, Black female spirituality, and political chicanery appear as recurring themes through a wide range of New Orleans literature.

Race has been one of the most consequential ideas in modern history, and the aims of this book are to better understand its intellectual genesis and proliferation. The introduction sets out the key themes of the volume and serves as a prelude to the geographical and temporal spread of the following chapters. Although the idea of ‘race’ emerged in European vernaculars in the late middle ages, we trace lines of continuity in its understanding and usage from the eighteenth century to the present. By juxtaposing discrete case studies of how race was conceptualised in different places over this period we hope to shed light on how the intellectual category of race that we have inherited was constructed, while showing connections between ideas and experience.

Chapter 25 delves into Ana Maria Gonçalves’ 2006 Um defeito de cor. The novel opens with a stark portrayal of the brutal realities of the transatlantic slave trade and the harsh labor endured in nineteenth-century Brazil, evoking deep, collective trauma. Yet Gonçalves’ work defies the typical mold of historical fiction. Instead, Um defeito de cor expands the understanding of history by weaving in Afro-diasporic ritual objects, practices, and belief systems. These cultural elements reshape memory as the story of Kehinde, the protagonist of the novel, unfolds. Through this approach, history becomes both a discovery that feels familiar and a recognition that surprises. This complex interplay is captured, for instance, in the idea of serendipitous encounters, a concept also rooted in African traditions. In the end, the novel carves out a space for the literary assentamento (settlement) of an Afro-Atlantic identity and existence.

Chapter 17 offers a close look at contemporary Brazilian literature by focusing on two novels by Evaristo: Ponciá Vicêncio (2003) and Canto para ninar menino grande (2018). It explores the idea of escrevivência, a term Evaristo created by combining “escrever” (to write), “viver” (to live), and “ver-se” (to see oneself), to highlight the return of African cultural influences in Afro-Brazilian writing. The chapter highlights literary techniques like animist realism, syncretism, cyclical time, and polyphony that Evaristo uses to craft a unique narrative style blending autobiography, social critique, and the real-life experiences of Black women and other marginalized groups. For Evaristo, blackness is not just a way to confront racism but also a lens to reveal the deep-rooted African cultural heritage that shapes Brazilian culture, despite being historically overlooked.

Chapter 14 examines significant moments in the Brazilian novel through the lenses of race, gender, and sexuality, all framed by postcolonial theory. This perspective exposes deep-seated blind spots around abusive behaviors and hidden biases in the texts, showing just how these attitudes have been normalized by enduring colonial power structures. The chapter reveals how Blackness and Indigeneity have long been overshadowed by dominant white, masculine literary viewpoints. At the same time, it highlights counter-hegemonic works that actively challenge and resist patriarchal ideas. A standout example is the analysis of Coelho Neto’s Esfinge (1908), a lesser-known neo-Gothic “Frankensteinian” story about a character surgically fused from a man’s body and a woman’s head. The chapter covers a diverse range of authors – from José de Alencar to Conceição Evaristo – and works – from Bernardo Guimarães’ A escrava Isaura (1875) to Silviano Santiago’s Stella Manhattan (1985).

Chapter 1 discusses Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poems on Black youth, which intone a politics of resistance in the 1970s and early 1980s in the contexts of anti-Black violence, aggressive policing, and riot. For Stuart Hall, “policing the crisis” is tantamount to policing the category of “Black youth” as the social category through which the structural features of crisis become violently inflicted. LKJ’s dub poems “sound the violence” across Dread Beat and Blood, Inglan Is a Bitch, and his landmark poem on the 1981 Brixton Uprisings, “Di Great Insohreckshan,” which I read in the pages of Race Today (1982), where it was first published. The chapter concludes by discussing the poet’s literary acclaim with the Penguin publication of Mi Revalueshanary Fren in 2002. The arc of LKJ’s career – from a space of autonomy and advancing a politics of resistance to his literary recognition and canonization even as his writing illustrates how racial violence and social inequality persist and deepen – distills the movement of this book as a whole.

Chapter 5 studies the ways in which Bhanu Kapil and D. S. Marriott, two innovative British Asian and Black avant-garde writers based in the US, renovate lyric to invent a poetics of riot in the twenty-first century. The surplus of crisis – or what Joshua Clover has theorized in Riot. Strike. Riot as the new era of uprisings due to surplus economic immiseration disproportionately affecting racialized populations – appears in experimental form, which I call “surplus lyric.” In Ban en Banlieu, Kapil composes a cross-genre experimental poem to mediate instances of racialized violence against women spanning London, New Delhi, and the Bay of Bengal. In contrast, Marriott gives lyrical expression to a poetics of riot through his adaptations of the London-based underground musical genre of grime in his collection Duppies. Kapil and Marriott hold in common a political stance that envisions not progressive transformation but rather a radical abolition of the structures that perpetuate racial violence in Britain and elsewhere.

Critical thinking on the relationship between fashion and ideas of personhood tends to fall into two approaches: (1) the violation or diminishing of persons by fashion as an oppressive expression of gender expectations and base commercialism; (2) the celebration of fashion as an agential mode of performance and resignification. Both leave uncontested a set of mutually imbricated oppositions between persons versus nonpersons, interiority versus exteriority, essence versus surface, organic body versus synthetic dress. What happens to how we think about fashion and beauty when they take place on the denigrated, racialized, and gendered body? The woman of color presents a provocation about the toggle between personhood and objecthood. What if race is fashion (that is, stylized, transferable, synthetic), and what are the political implications of posing such a question?

What is literary about fashion and what are the ways in which fashion is literary? How and why does this matter for Black designers who reference Black history and culture in their work to intervene in dominant narratives about Black identity and the ways in which fashion broadcasts and/or delimits Black cultural expression? This chapter discusses the work of two Black fashion designers, Patrick Kelly and Kerby Jean-Raymond, both of whose careers can be described as “literary,” albeit in different ways. It argues that, despite the very different grammar of Kelly and Jean-Raymond’s work, as well as the decades that separate them, Jean-Raymond finds himself (at times) inside of Kelly’s story, mounting a similar critique of the fashion industry and its “single story” of Black designers and Black culture as available for exploitation and appropriation. This chapter proposes that Kerby’s literariness, his insistence that he tell his story with a capital “I” – intimately involving and representing his loved ones and a diasporic Black family in his clothes and in their performance at his shows – might create a new, liberatory language for and with fashion and race.

This chapter explores the role of poetics in theorizing blackness. That is, if the question of being is an abiding issue in black studies and if that question figures through discourses about black writing, how does poetics contribute to this study? Rather than engage blackness as a content in poems, the chapter considers poetry as an intervention in language. This attentiveness to language characterizes a kind of thinking that is manifest in poetics and that generates possibilities for engaging the philosophical relationship between expressiveness and blackness.

References to Ignatius Sancho’s wife, children, and family life are interweaved throughout his letters. Sancho often wrote to his friends, briefly updating them on his family’s well-being and activities. When these brief references are collated and analyzed, an underrepresented perspective of Sancho’s family as a middling Black family emerges, where the Sanchos each embody the ideal representation of husbands, fathers, wives, mothers, and children. These references to the Sancho family in the Letters help make the Sancho family one of eighteenth-century London’s most well-documented Black families. More importantly, the family’s representation in the Letters answers essential questions about how the Black family were perceived in society and the role class, race, and gender play in shaping childhood, parental relationships, and family life. This chapter details the representations of Blackness, fatherhood, motherhood, and childhood observed in the Sancho family.

The chapter discusses the respective locations and “values” of Indigeneity and Blackness vis-à-vis whiteness and ethnoracial mixings in ideological constructions of national identity in two different Latin American historical periods: “monocultural mestizaje” and multiculturalism. After delving into the ideological foundations of monocultural mestizaje and “racial democracy,” the chapter considers the advent of what has been called “the Latin American multicultural turn,” which began emerging unevenly in the region in the late 1980s. The “turn” brought about new official narrations of the nation, in a move away from the “monocultural mestizaje” ideology of national identity that reifies the mestizo as the prototypical national identity, to instead nominally recognize and “embrace” national ethnoracial diversity in a wave of new constitutions and constitutional reforms. The chapter concludes that both racial hierarchy and the mestizaje ideology of national identity remain alive and well, as the colonial racial order has adapted to contemporary circumstances, including the ideological shift from monocultural mestizaje to multiculturalism.

Three: I address the cormorant’s alleged greed, reflecting on the etymological associations of the bird’s name and discussing a range of contexts, from medieval to contemporary, in which the cormorant’s greed becomes a cultural trope. I then outline scientific debates over the bird’s recovery from persecution, numerical resurgence and impact on fish stocks, noting the ways in which zoologists address the bird’s consumption of fish and assessing whether or not it is reasonable to describe the cormorant as ‘greedy’. I conclude by turning away from the consuming cormorant to the cormorant consumed, reflecting on the curious cultural associations, not least in respect of the cultural meanings of blackness, apparent in the history and politics (not to mention the weirdness) of the culinary cormorant.

From the medieval to the modern, King Arthur is habitually but not neccessarily associated with white male sovereignty authorised by violence against racially Othered peoples. Arthur is always raced but he is not essentially white. This chapter is interested in both the lacunae and the articulations of ‘race’ in Arthurian scholarship, and in what emerges when we pay attention to the racial Self as well as Others in medieval and modern Arthuriana. Situated in premodern critical race studies, and exploring African American Arthuriana in particular, the essay argues that paying attention to the embodiment of Arthur once again reveals the protean nature of race itself.

The chapter addresses the different ways in which Sankofa Danzafro’s Afro-contemporary dance company in Colombia constructs anti-racist narratives. From the perspective of dance as a practice of irruption and an embodied practice, we focus on the role of affective traction in its varied manifestations, which work to assemble collective bodies and discourses. Acting as a site of political enunciation and as a way of resistance-in-motion, dance generates affective atmospheres that make visible and challenge the persistence of structural racism. Among the anti-racist strategies channeled through Sankofa’s Afro-contemporary dance are i) challenging stereotypes about Afro-descendant people by focusing on the message of the dance rather than only its performance; ii) delving into the past, seeking out embodied knowledge and Afro self-referentiality as resources; and iii) developing an Afro-contemporary aesthetic project informed by Afro-Colombian traditional dance and music as well as contemporary styles and rhythms. In particular, the chapter explores Detrás del sur, a recent Sankofa dance work, to see how these anti-racist strategies have informed the creative processes behind the work.

From its “Golden Age” in Paris during the interwar years, to its subsequent rearticulations and revisions in the following decades, negritude has remained something of a moving target for literary-historical inquiry while garnering significant criticism, especially leading up to and in the immediate wake of formal decolonization. This chapter reconsiders negritude’s contested origins and complex trajectory through African and Afro-diasporic thought, identifying suggestive new lexical sources for this supposed neologism that stand to shed light on the underappreciated “oracular” or “prophetic” dimensions of negritude. It argues for the enduring relevance of negritude as a key site for articulations of blackness in French and as a horizon for African literature more broadly.