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Signaling such recent activist and aesthetic concepts in the work of Kara Walker, Childish Gambino, BLM, Janelle Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar, and marking the exit of the Obama Administration and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future, and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S. The essays in African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity engage readers in critical conversations by activists, scholars, and artists reflecting on national and transnational legacies of African American activism as an element of artistic practice, particularly as they concern artistic expression and race relations, and the intersections of creative processes with economic, sociological, and psychological inequalities. Scholars from the fields of communication, theater, queer studies, media studies, performance studies, dance, visual arts, and fashion design, to name a few, collectively ask: What are the connections between African American arts, the work of social justice, and creative processes? If we conceive the arts as critical to the legacy of Black activism in the United States, how can we use that construct to inform our understanding of the complicated intersections of African American activism and aesthetics? How might we as scholars and creative thinkers further employ the arts to envision and shape a verdant society?

Contributors: Carrie Mae Weems, Carmen Gillespie, Rikki Byrd, Amber Lauren Johnson, Doria E. Charlson, Florencia V. Cornet, Daniel McNeil, Lucy Caplan, Genevieve Hyacinthe, Sammantha McCalla, Nettrice R. Gaskins, Abby Dobson, J. Michael Kinsey, Shondrika Moss-Bouldin, Julie B. Johnson, Sharrell D. Luckett, Jasmine Eileen Coles, Tawnya Pettiford-Wates, Rickerby Hinds.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 

Reorienting critical theory and literary criticism to consider how the present contains seeds of a future beyond capitalism

Critical theorists have long held to the axiom that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Greg Forter starts this wide-ranging study of contemporary literature by suggesting that this position is increasingly hard to maintain. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the global rise of the New Right, and the mass disruptions and despair wrought by COVID-19, the story that capital had built about itself has begun to reveal cracks in its foundations. Capitalism has not succeeded in fully flattening or homogenizing time. Developing in combined and uneven fashion, it has retained the residues of pasts that suggest other futures are possible. Forter assembles a corpus of novels that theorize this insight. He names these fictions speculative realism to highlight how they map the closures of our present while opening that present onto other, more speculative orders of time. In the face of ongoing, overlapping crises, Forter posits, these fictions locate flickering intimations of a utopian somewhen; they illuminate a present charged with precipitates of a transfigured but now imaginable future.

Bringing together postwar German, Israeli, and Anglo-American literature, Eshel traces a shared trajectory of futurity in world literature. He begins by examining German works of fiction and the debates they spurred over the future character of Germany’s public sphere. Turning to literary works by Jewish-Israeli writers as they revisit Israel’s political birth, he shows how these stories inspired a powerful reconsideration of Israel’s identity. Eshel then discusses post-1989 literature—from Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs to J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year—revealing how these books turn to events like World War II and the Iraq War not simply to make sense of the past but to contemplate the political and intellectual horizon that emerged after 1989. Bringing to light how reflections on the past create tools for the future, Futurity reminds us of the numerous possibilities literature holds for grappling with the challenges of both today and tomorrow.

In The Future of Futurity, Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta examine the lives and experiences of call center agents in India’s business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, who live in Bengaluru and work for customers in the Global North. Mankekar and Gupta show how futurity—an affective-temporal potentiality and mode of being that emphasizes the unfolding of time—enables BPO workers to strive for hopeful futures despite their experiences of growing inequality, volatility, and violence. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with managers, owners, and workers of BPO companies, the authors explore how workers find pathways for navigating a globalized world and for imagining their futures in it. They point to the heterogeneous lives, yearnings, and anxieties of BPO workers, foregrounding the disjunctions and conjunctions between labor, corporeality, intimacy, family life, and mobility. Mankekar and Gupta show how workers’ daily lives and imaginings of the future point to the relationships between futurity, capital, and technology as well as futurity’s imbrications with contemporary racial capitalism. In so doing, the authors insist on the transformative potential of futurity even in conditions of extreme precarity.

Moving freely between essay, close-reading, ekphrasis, memoir, travelogue, lecture notes, poetry, and even monologue, Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds presents a series of “thinking-throughs” of formally innovative and politically oriented poets pushing the boundaries of what poetry can hold. Tracing a personal family history of immigration amidst larger concerns of diaspora, “unsayability,” and absence, Wendy Xu reads the work of poets including Layli Long Soldier, Inger Christensen, Ocean Vuong, Liu Xia, giovanni singleton, Bei Dao, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and others. She explores existential and pedagogical questions in poetry from the point of view of a reader and a teacher. Why write? and why invite the paradoxes of a documentary approach into that writing? 

Not an overview or primer, least of all the final word, this free-ranging exploration of contemporary poetry considers larger questions of belonging, diaspora, the violence of language, the allure of the past, genre, witness, and form. It returns to memorable touchstone texts in the author’s life with renewed curiosity about their inner workings. Essays move with restless curiosity across topics, bringing them into conversation with poetry, from considering depictions of Christ in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, to the ecstatic illegible texts of Henri Michaux, discomfiting likenesses of agoraphobia and political imprisonment, and the epistolary trouble of fan-mail. Xu is drawn to poetry works of radical hybridity alongside personal experiences of formal intensity, as an immigrant daughter, a parentified child, an occasional agoraphobe, and a writer. Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds is a tour of poetic influences and the futures they’ve made possible.