Radical Elegies: White Violence, Patriarchy, and Necropoetics

Description

Why is the poetic mode of elegy so often understood as the domain of white, wealthy male poets? What possibilities and limitations exist for rethinking the ways in which we construct an elegiac tradition? Through close examination of the rigid hierarchies and binaries that pervade the elegiac canon as it is traditionally understood, this book explores these possibilities in order to examine whose work tends to be excluded from the discourse and why. Through in-depth close readings of elegies by Black women, trans* women, and non-binary writers, this book foregrounds forms of poetic knowledge and poetic practices that trouble - or work against - the ideals, values, standards and forms of knowledge embodied by the ‘English’ elegy so often privileged within canonical tradition. In doing so, it offers a challenge to the ways in which we currently read elegy, unearthing possibilities for revising our understanding of the elegiac tradition. Cover Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Against genealogy White violence: The ‘English elegy’ and its colonial foundations Patriarchy: The intersectional biases of a genealogical approach Genealogy as necropoetics Radical elegies A note on positionality Notes 1 Ornate absences and rhetorical acts: The scholarly reception of elegies by Black and African American women poets Black elegies, white elegies: Prescriptive gestures Safe grief and dangerous grief Militant grief and the Black Aesthetic Radical Black women’s elegy: Wheatley, Brooks, Clifton Notes 2 Resisting necrophilous white patriarchy: Elegies about racial injustice The limits of elegiac genealogy Red ooze, severed gaze and the maintenance of white masculinity: Elegies for Emmett Till Reflections, disintegrations, incendiary materials: Civil Rights elegies Necrophilous white state violence: Post-Civil Rights elegies Notes 3 Abstracted grief, precarious grief: Rethinking elegy via transfeminism and queer necropolitics Re-makings, multiplicities, displacements: Beyond binary concepts of gender Necropolitics: Precarity, dehumanization and grievability Abstract bodies and the complicit reader: Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s ‘Poem (Let us Live)’ Irregularity and memorial: Ryka Aoki’s ‘The Woman of Water Dreams’ Body as site of colonial struggle: Qwo-Li Driskill’s ‘Pedagogy’ Towards some conclusions Notes 4 Anti-museum, anti-archive and personal elegy: Writing the human back into being Mourning through the cracks: Fragile intimacy in Solmaz Sharif’s ‘Personal Effects’ Inherited grief: Kay Ulanday Barrett’s ‘While looking at photo albums’ Deafness and ‘cure’: Meg Day’s ‘Elegy in Translation’ Postscript Note References Index