At the time of the Black Lives Matter protests, intricate, innovative works by Black artists filled screens, airwaves, and bookshelves. Capacious in scope, heterogeneous and polyvocal in material, and taking up space in the cultural imaginary the way that activists take up space in the public square, these works aim toward making Black lives matter from within institutions that persist on the subjugation and appropriation of Black people. In Black Epic, David M. de León elucidates the twenty-first-century Black epic form, the song of the collective that takes up space and builds new worlds. Drawing on Kevin Quashie’s black aliveness, Édouard Glissant’s nation consciousness, and Richard Iton’s black fantastic, they describe how Tyehimba Jess, Claudia Rankine, Robin Coste Lewis, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and others create space in antiblackness to imagine a Black world. With keen attention to how poetics—language, poetry, music, dance, marches, riots, and informal politics—bend the cultural imaginary, de León reveals the Black epic as a self-monumentalizing totality that subsumes oppression into a new story, a Black story.

David M. de León is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno.

“Black Epic is epic. This study uncovers the power of the poetry that is taking up black space and claiming black time in the second half of the twenty-first century. Like Kevin Quashie’s black aliveness, Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ black feminist fugitivity, and Saidiya Hartman’s waywardness, the ‘epicness of Blackness’ creates space for a deeper understanding of radical black imaginations.”
-- Margo Natalie Crawford, author of Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics

Introduction. Taking Up Space: Poetics in Protest
1. Step Right Up: The Many Minstrel Shows of Tyehimba Jess’s Olio
2. Lord Love a Duck: Claudia Rankine Reads Her Readers
3. Losing the Floor: Robin Coste Lewis and the Erotics of the Archive
Conclusion. Afterworld: Alexis Pauline Gumbs After the End of the Word
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index