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Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen
Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison
Lorenzo Thomas, in Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry, suggests that the difficulty of publishing and public recognition, as much as philosophical commitment to either a social or aesthetic agenda, may also have helped to perpetuate the divisions in poetry and audiences above.7 Thomas notes that often "visibility depends upon the emergence of an aesthetic or political program that provides a convenient rubric or perhaps a fortunate commercial interest. The emergence of the Black Arts movement manifestos in 1965 and at the 1966 Fisk University Writers' Conference provided such a rubric."8 Manifestos and anthologies of language poetry performed a similar service, providing lesser-known poets with a label, however ill-fitting and reductive, by which to become more visible. Critics and anthology editors thereby had ready-made categories in which to place, discuss, and promote new work. Given this rubric, and the continuing, sometimes pernicious, expectation that writers of color would write about race, many younger writers who consider themselves heirs of the Black Arts movement have felt that their work must foster coherent group identity rather than dissect the premises of identity and must signify "blackness" in recognizable ways. Nonetheless, there are and have been a number of recent poets of color who "resist mainstream forms of poetic expression," precisely because those forms seem to require a static representation of racial identity in transparent, and somewhat circumscribed, language.9
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Writing in 1990, bell hooks voiced a sense of artistic limitation in the Black Aesthetic of that historical moment: "Narrow limiting aesthetics within black communities tend to place innovative black artistry on the margins."10 Writing ten years later, Houston Baker suggested that critical notions of "blackness" had changed significantly: "the 'blackness' into which I was initiated during the heady days of the Black Aesthetic of the 19605 and 19705 has been academically superseded by what I want to call a fourth wave of criticism and analysis focused on African American intellectual and cultural production." " This essay seeks to ride that fourth wave. Tracing changes in poetic and critical conceptions of black subjectivity from the 19605 to the present, I will examine the intersection of the intellectual currents outlined above in the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen.
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