
Contents
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Introduction Introduction
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The Riot Poem and Its Abolitionist Poetics The Riot Poem and Its Abolitionist Poetics
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Dancing in the Streets Dancing in the Streets
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Conclusion Conclusion
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10 ‘If I write a Love poem it’s against the police’: The Abolitionist Poetics of the Riot
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Published:November 2023
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Abstract
This chapter reads ‘riot poems’ from the late 1960s to the present moment. We perform a materialist reading of this historical period (including the 1960s as a transitional period between post-war growth and 1973, a year that periodizes the beginning of sustained economic downturn), asking how the poem as a social object can allow us to sense the shape of social movements. Reading work by Miguel James, Wendy Trevino, Gwendolyn Brooks, and David Henderson, we argue that the ‘riot poem’ instructs readers to engage with the specific, contingent conditions in which struggle happens and is learned, shared, contested, won, and lost. We propose that the riot poem attempts to capture the conditions that produced the riot as well as the intensities that comprise rioting, in order to produce a document for future readers to study struggles for abolition in their historical situation. A riot poem makes a certain demand on its reader to consider the conditions of its making—that is, to consider the particular resistance it documents—and it also instructs a reader to be attentive to social meanings as they come to be articulated in new and unexpected ways.
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