Affect and Diaspora: Unfashionable Hope in Melvin B. Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia

This essay reads Melvin B. Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia as a poem undergirded by a transnational and multi-ethnic politics of identification. Previous scholars of Tolson’s work have argued that his poetry expands and redefines the possibilities inherent in modernist poetics. Building on these claims, I point to a specific and heretofore unremarked strategy through which he accomplishes this goal: namely, a bold affective optimism that both presages Afro-futurism and counters political ideologies founded on racial difference. Tolson’s Marxist-democratic vision of a future utopian society centered in Africa but extending throughout the world is rooted in his belief in the possibility of affective connection between individuals otherwise divided by class, race, or language. In its subversion and revision of received cultural categories, such a connection also constitutes a response to engrained forms of racial melancholia. While refusing to overlook systemic and historical injustice, Tolson’s Libretto, thus, offers a window into a politics of optimism that restores a sense of social hope to discussions in recent and contemporary affect theory.