For my paper, I’m trying to focus on investigating the idea of “double-consciousness,” racial authenticity, and identity in African-American poetics across the 20th century and into the 21st century. I want to trace how race has been poeticized and politicized through the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and today with a resurgence of racial conversation in our nation.
In the Harlem Renaissance, artists struggled with the concept of the “New Negro,” of using the forms of white writers with white histories, of incorporating jazz and African culture into poetry, and the rejection/acceptance of black arts as culturally significant or valuable. In the Black Arts Movement, the poetry appeared to focus on racism and classism in America; the poetry was more visually violent and forceful than in the Harlem Renaissance. Their poetry shared some similarities in poets of each movement rejected standard American English conventions. Shockley states, “BAM poets thus frequently repudiated standard modes of capitalization, spelling, punctuation, and syntax in favor of typography and orthography meant to represent a written vernacular speech and other sonic forms of black culture” (183). Shockley also describes how “‘Black Art,’ in other words, would provide African Americans with what Neal called ‘a new synthesis, a new sense of literature as a living reality’ connected to their own experiences” (183).
Most of my reading list consists of African-American poets today and the poetics surrounding social issues among races in America.
- “Not an Elegy for Mike Brown” Danez Smith
- “Alternative Names for Black Boys” Danez Smith
- “The Ballad of Ferguson, Missouri” Frederick Siedel
- “Power” Audre Lorde (1978)
- “Harvard Grad Gives Spoken Word Poem at Graduation” news article
- Lamont Lilly Honor in the Ghetto
- Through Poetry and TED Talks, Clint Smith Probes Racism in America
- Cambridge Poet Clint Smith on Race in America
- Black Youth Project
- Taye Diggs’ Poem on Black Lives Matter
- The Last Poets: America in Poetry from Black Power to Black Lives Matter
- “The Measure of a Black Life?: A Poetic Interpretation of Hope and Discontent” Lisa William-White from Qualitative Research in Education
- “Corpsing; or The Matter of Black Life” by David Mariott
- “Out of the Poetry Ghetto: The Life/Art Struggle of Small Black Publishing Houses” by Melba Joyce Boyd
- “Interview on the #Charlestonsyllabus” by Chad Williams
- “The Hidden Narratives: Recovering and (Re)Visioning the Community Activism of Men in the Black Panther Party” by Mary Phillips
- “Every Nigger is a Star: Reimagining Blackness from Post-Civl Rights America to the Postindependence Caribbean” by Erica Moiah James
- “Rewriting White: Race, Class, and Cultural Capital in 19th Century America” by Tim Engles
- “Race, Human Empathy, and Negative Capability: The Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa” by Angela Salas
- “Terrance Hayes and Natasha Trethewey: Contemporary Black Chroniclers of the Imagined South” by William M. Ramsey
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