Black Epic (Poetics in the Time of Black Lives Matter)

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.