English 421 - Apocalypse How? Poetry at the End of Empire

We are living in the end-times of empire and racial capital, and thus, we are experiencing the long brutality of the western world order’s final tantrums. As poets and journalists are assassinated in Gaza for their permission to narrate, as poets in the Global North risk their livelihoods to protest many genocides we are complicit in, and poets in the Global South resist forces of total annihilation daily, this class will honor our living, dead, and the long histories of anti-imperial poetics throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Contexts we will study include: Palestinian resistance poetry, Vietnamese poetry in the aftermath of the war, Korean anti-colonial poetry, and other poetry of direct witness of, and participation in, resistive efforts in Grenada, Lebanon, Sudan, and other Afro-Asian and global Indigenous contexts. Theory readings may include Glissant, Césaire, Fanon, Simpson, Abourahme, Kanafani, Wynter, and more. Poets we read may include Dionne Brand, Cathy Linh Che, Don Mee Choi, Refaat Alareer, Etel Adnan, Olivia Elias, and more. Assignments will be oriented towards skill-building within the contemporary poetry landscape: writing book reviews on recent poetry collections and public-facing literary criticism that comments on, and historicizes, trends in poetry, and participating in the editorial process of a contemporary poetry anthology with Interlink Books (the only Palestinian-owned book publisher in the US).  

Limited to 15 students. Prerequisite: At least one English class at the 300 level or higher (or a 300- or 400-level class in another humanities department). Spring semester. Writer-in-Residence Abraham.

How to handle overenrollment: Preference given to English majors, especially with Creative Writing focuses, in the case of over-enrollment.

Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: emphasis on written work, readings, independent research, oral presentations, group work, and artistic work.