This article explores how contemporary US black poetics evidences the entanglement of the history of lyric with the history of race. Through readings of the work of Claudia Rankine, Evie Shockley, Tyehimba Jess and Terrance Hayes, I make the case that this poetics situates American lyric within the violence of Reconstruction to imagine how Black Reconstruction may be enacted in cultural form. My contention is that this poetics makes lyric “unfit for history” and thus exposes the racialization processes embedded in poetry's modern life forms. I show how this poetics does not simply recuperate lyric subjectivity but presents a different model of subjectivity altogether, one that is rooted in a fugitive idea of blackness. I locate this lyric from the publication of Shockley's the new black (2011), as a reckoning with the failures of representation that were pronounced in the colour-blind politics of the Obama era and chart it to Hayes's engagement with Trumpian politics in his sonnet sequence American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018). I argue that this contemporary poetics, which makes its argument through a destabilization of genre, unravels the racialization processes embedded in the form of reading poetry that Virginia Jackson refers to as “lyricization.”

The CIA is increasingly symbolic of major controversies in American foreign policy. It also presents the academic researcher with a fascinating paradox – since it is simultaneously secret and yet high-profile. In part, this is due to the CIA's willingness to allow former operatives to write memoirs. We argue that the memoir literature, authored by CIA personnel both high and low, together with others who worked alongside them, is now so dense that this allows us a degree of triangulation. Yet these memoirs are increasingly collective productions, involving censors, ghostwriters and teams of researchers, introducing conflicting voices into the text, and adding layers of separation between author and reader. We suggest that these ghosted memoirs, therefore, operate on several levels. For good or ill, these books shape the American public's perception of the CIA and should be studied closely, especially by those interested in the subjectivities of image management. This essay seeks to explore these issues by comparing four memoirs by CIA directors and acting directors who have served since 9/11.

In 1959, T. S. Eliot said of his poetry, “My urban imagery was that of St. Louis.” This paper reads Eliot's The Waste Land in light of this comment, investigating the extent to which the construction of his hometown, St. Louis, in the nineteenth century, impinges upon the poem. The paper outlines the cultural conditions of St. Louis's construction as part of a settler colonial project, heavily influenced by certain narratives of quest and conquest. Throughout the construction of St. Louis, geographical and historical realities were continually replaced by an urban landscape which served to reflect these settler narratives. Using three separate case studies – the construction of the Eads Bridge, the destruction of the Cahokia mounds, and the St. Louis fire of 1849 – this paper makes the case that Eliot's characterization of urban space in The Waste Land as “unreal” is rooted in the construction of his hometown.

This study investigates the shifting meanings invested in the ragtime song “A Hot Time in the Old Time, Tonight” at the turn of the twentieth century. Complicating the tune's place in the canon of military, political, and national anthems was its associations with “vice,” black culture, and white supremacy. By mapping the ritual and representational uses of the song, this investigation demonstrates how “A Hot Time” served paradoxical functions that simultaneously affirmed and unsettled American exceptionalism. In doing so, this article traces the processes of obfuscation whereby black musical traditions and white supremacy defined America's distinctive national identity.

Playing into the master narrative of the US civil rights movement, John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell's March trilogy negotiates not only the movement's tactics and achievements, but also its initial mediation through photography and television and its ongoing remediation. Taking the memoir's urge to teach as a starting point, this article assesses its didactic impulses and implications, combining a historiographic approach with an assessment of the narrative's visual construction. The article highlights the trilogy's potentials and shortcomings as an intervention into civil rights memory and outlines a metacritical pedagogy through which March can become potent classroom material.

Jean Lartéguy's 1960 novel The Centurions, which follows a group of French paratroopers through the wars in Indochina and Algeria, is one that has achieved cult status within the US military. In embracing this novel as a valuable how-to guide for counterinsurgents, those who promote The Centurions ignore the sexual violence and misogyny at the heart of the work, reflecting deeper silences over the issue of sexual violence in war. This article explores both the depictions of sexual violence in The Centurions and the silences that surround those depictions.

In 2009, Residente, the lead singer of a well-known Latinx music group and newly appointed international ambassador for the Latino Commission on AIDS, likened Latinxs in the US to HIV/AIDS. Taking this fertile equivalence as a conceptual point of departure, this article tracks the pitfalls and possibilities of aligning these two positions, touching on the performativity of disgust, the transmission of brown affect, and economies of racialization and deracination via the exchange of viral matter. Building upon the reparative labour of critical mestizaje, which came to the fore of Latinx studies in the 1980s, I reimagine the potentiality of a “viral mestizaje,” a form of relatedness that allows for networks of intimacy, multiplicity, and reproduction that extend beyond heternormative coupling. What is at stake in the positioning of Latinxs as “just like AIDS”? What are the possibilities and problems of analogy?

November 2017. New Brunswick, Canada. Having spent five hours banding lobster claws, Karissa Lindstrand detects an anomaly on one of the crustaceans. Inscribed on its left pincer is a familiar yet resolutely inorganic swirl of red, blue, and white. A corporate sigil branded onto the exoskeletal form of aquatic life: the Pepsi globe. While marine biologists disagree about the conditions under which the lobster acquired its tattoo – one suggestion is that the creature grew into a discarded can, another is that a cardboard box adhered to its propodite limb – the specific cause is less significant than what the marking represents on a world-historical scale. From this position, the lobster's deformation can be seen as an embodiment of the metabolic rift between global capitalism and nonhuman nature, presenting itself here as a grotesque reminder that human society exists within an earthly metabolism and that our hegemonic social arrangement – engineering profit through the mass production of commodities – is disrupting an equilibrium required for the sustenance of life on this planet. We encounter that rift in more ways than one: in the lobster's biological fusion with the refuse of one commodity, a melding together of two radically dissimilar sets of armor, but also in the fact that the moment the lobster is dredged from the ocean it is transformed, by the human labor of fishing, from a natural resource into a sellable form. “It is probably in Boston,” Lindstrand speculated on the lobster's passage through the market to its ultimate destiny as luxury comestible. The idea that capitalism is averse to the ecological matrix within which all life adheres, opening up a rift between a humanly engineered economy and its nonhuman biosphere, is not new. It originated in the nineteenth century, when Karl Marx theorized that capitalist production inaugurates “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.” And yet that rift has widened and deepened through the ecohistorical period beginning around 1945, during what is often described as the Great Acceleration, an economically conditioned phase of planetary time when anthropogenic activity presaged environmental transformation on an unprecedented scale. Toxic sludge, oil spills, nuclear winter, extinction events wrought in flood and fire: such are the forms of our metabolic rift, in the context of whose proliferation “climate change” reads as the most inadequate of all euphemisms. That is what we are given to behold, as a kind of biomorphic prosopopoeia, in the lobster's claw.