Fourteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

This paper is interested in how contemporary Black American poets reclaim the lyric subject in formally experimental new work. To what extent can anecdote as a metaphor in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric convey the racialized experience to white readers? How can poetry expose the grammatical and semantic logic that complement a hegemonic liberal ideology of subjectivity as universal and individual, never particular or collective? Can poetry effectively communicate across racial difference to inspire social change, or does poetic communication remain limited by interpretative openness and confined to an aesthetic, or abstract, realm? Concerned with similarity and difference, metaphor mirrors the process of racial categorization that imbues the aesthetic with signification. Yet the same capacity to represent the abstract and intervene in assumed equivalencies allows metaphor to imaginatively challenge assumed relationships between signifier and signified. I will take Rankine’s anecdote as a metaphor as an example of poetic language’s potential to reimagine and contest racial meaning. I will also confront the political dangers of the same poetic capacity for openness as it gestures toward universal intersubjectivity and accommodates indeterminacy. I will draw from Rankine as well as contemporary lyricists Thomas Sayers Ellis and Tonya Foster to point toward an emergent renegotiation of the politics of recognition in poetry. I will ultimately suggest that poetry contains a unique potential to reimagine and communicate the subject in ways that acknowledge its socially interpellated, collective, and always racialized nature.