Content provided in partnership with
Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen
Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison
Since the 19705, many critics of contemporary American poetry have focused on the issue of subjectivity, particularly the "I" or speaker in poetry and its political implications. Far fewer studies have focused on the subjectivities of actual audiences for recent poetry, though reader-response critics and reception theorists have extensively discussed how individual readers interpret novels old and new.1 Because most reader-response theorists focus on novels and narrative, the shifting conventions within different poetry communities do not often figure into their examination of individual readers interpretive practices. Though this essay will describe both the real and imagined readers of these poetries, it is most concerned with delineating how different historical and critical moments, specifically the Black Arts movement and poststructuralism, shape poets' notions of their audiences and determine how that work is received and understood. This essay joins other recent scholarship that assembles an alternative tradition of African American avant-garde poetryin contrast to long-prevailing notions of accessible, plain-spoken black poetry-and it contributes to that scholarship a focus on poetry by women as well as a focus on the popular and critical reception of such work over four decades. Through examining how the cultural and critical contexts around each poet shifted, one can more clearly trace how American paradigms of race and writing have changed and continue to change.
- More Articles of Interest
- On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation - Review
- "A material collapse that is construction": History and Counter-Memory in...
- Double Consciousness, Modernism, and Womanist Themes in Gwendolyn Brooks's...
- A prophet overheard: a juxtapositional reading of Gwendolyn Brooks's "In...
- Nervous comeback in February after January's selloff. (Month in Insurance...
- Most Popular Articles in News
- The Ten Best Laptop bags
- Tata plans cheapest-ever car for Indian market
- GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD WORLD
- Corn is good for you; Corn is not only a tasty treat, but also a cereal that ...
- THE 50 BEST STYLISH HANDBAGS TO CARRY
- More »
Those critics who have discussed contemporary poetry's audiences have called for poets to liberate readers-to different ends and via different means. For instance, back in 1971, Ron Karenga called for poetry of the Black Arts movement to rally and uplift readers around a new racial identity, to "reflect and support the Black Revolution ... to expose the enemy, praise the people, and support the revolution."2 As Karenga saw it, readers would collectively receive from artists clear messages that would help to forge a new consciousness of racial identity and of the need for revolutionary action. Just over a decade later, in 1983, Lyn Hejinian called for "open texts" that are "generative rather than directive, [that] emphasize ... process, [and] ... resist the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material, turn it into a product; [that] resist reduction and commodification."( Hejinian and other language writers sought a poetic revolution, whose political effects they awaited. Rather than receiving doctrinal, closed messages, or deciphering the author's intentions, each reader would participate in the making of his or her message and develop a new consciousness of how language (over)determines identities and meanings. While poets and theorists have worked very hard indeed to reconcile these two visions of art's relation to politics, poets writing in the wake of poststructuralism have until recently tended to write with an eye toward either sociopolitical or linguistic revolution.
For poets of color coming of age since the 19705, these artistic imperativesto write the revolution or to write the process of linguistic revolution-have often been felt as competing, contradictory demands. Where the Black Arts movement and much poetry influenced by it called for audiences to recognize a new racial pride and a coherent group identity, poststructuralist writing, language writing, and poetry in their wake called for readers to question the literary and linguistic formulations of identity, to distrust the "I," and to interrogate fictions of autobiographical progression, coherence, or consistency within subjectivity. Of course, much poetry of the Black Arts movement tackled social and linguistic opposition at once. Dense, self-reflexive, disjunctive work by Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Clarence Major, as well as Gwendolyn Brooks, appeared in the 1960$ and '70s. However, as Aldon Nielsen notes in Black Chant: Uinguages of African-American Postmodernism, in subsequent critical discussion of Black Arts poetry the legacy of the movement has narrowed, focusing on a few accessible works and poets, thereby "ensuring the invisibility of the others."1 With the Black Arts movement's poetic innovations only recently gaining sustained critical attention then, poets who sought to represent race from the 19705 to the 19905 faced a conflict in literary expectations, particularly if they wished their work to reach broad audiences.
Disparate conceptions of racial identity, producing divergent formulations of race in American poetry, clearly precede the 19705 and the split before and after poststructuralism that I allude to here. Certainly, Langston Hughes s and Countee Cullen's stylistic differences stem as much from different ideas of racial identity as from different wishes for audiences and literary posterity. In his essay, "Performing Blackness," Kimberly Benston not only outlines disputed conceptions of blackness in African American poetry before 1970, but also seeks to construct a paradigm for reading and writing about black poetry that synthesizes its internal disagreements.5 Comparing the texts of Ralph Ellison and Amiri Baraka, Benston writes that poets who "embracfe] the Black Arts' ideological claim for an autonomous black poetics [rather than] seeking to situate black poetics within a larger . . . framework of American/Western/ Human creativity" replay the literature's own dialectical "argument[s] about the nature of blackness, performance, and the modern Afro-American self" (168). Baraka, Benston writes, "invokes the extralinguistic standard of'correct' blackness in erecting a vision of the poetic canon, [whereas Ellison] refocuses attention on the verbal medium in which [an] eclectic or 'synthetic' vision of blackness evolves from generation to generation" (174). In Benston's implied literary history, the Black Arts movement momentarily froze black identity, referring to it as constituted outside and before the text (182). However, the "differences within black discourse(s)," which Benston called upon critics to highlight, are now visibly back in play within the critical perspectives of Aldon Nielsen, Lorenzo Thomas, and Harryette Mullen, among others (183).6
