In African American poetry, renaming may reflect cultural reclamation, political transformation, ancestral recovery, or resistance to imposed terminology. Because naming has historically been tied to enslavement, racial classification, and social hierarchy, changing names can carry deep symbolic force. The term helps explain poetry where language itself becomes a battleground over dignity, belonging, and the authority to define self or history.

Renaming in African American poetry is a political and spiritual act with deep historical roots: the stripping of African names under slavery, the assignment of slaveholder surnames, and the freedom of self-naming after emancipation (when many formerly enslaved people chose surnames like "Freeman" or "Lincoln" or reclaimed African-derived names). The Nation of Islam's practice of replacing "slave names" with "X" and then chosen Muslim names is a mid-twentieth-century example; contemporary naming practices continue this politics. Students should read renaming poems alongside the history of African name reclamation movements and the political debates about naming practices (Negro/Black/African American/Black). Related terms include naming ceremony, Black subjectivity, countermemory, and dispossession.