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Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen
Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison
The prevailing view of the Black Aesthetic and its multicultural heirs diverges notably from American poetry influenced by postmodernist theories of language and subjectivity in its stances toward the poetic speaker, language, politics, and audience. In contrast to the oral bases of many black artists' work, language poetry was written, read, and listened to not tor previously untold stories or patterns of imagery, but for its reflections on and play with language; it deconstructed narrative at the level of the sentence rather than producing narratives of a historically marginalized people. Though often claiming its appeal to wide audiences, language poetry was difficult and dense and was initially read mainly by cutting-edge poets and some academic audiences. Poetry of the Black Aesthetic, meanwhile, strove to be accessible to ordinary readers. Though both poetic modes were interested in the political effects of reading, their notions of political action were quite different. The Black Aesthetic called for sociopolitical awareness and action on the part of its readers, as Brookss work demonstrates. In contrast, language writers called for readers to rethink their relations to reading and language and to become aware of the political implications of those relations. Poets who defended traditional poetic conventions often regarded formally innovative poetry as politically unhelpful, primarily because its political commentary, couched more in syntax than content, eluded many readers. After 1968, literary debates about the politics of "coherent voice" ran on different tracks in these poetries. Many poets of the Black Aesthetic and multicultural lyric valued recognizable, coherent, empowering representations of race, gender, and class in literary work, in part manifested through the "voice" of the poetic speaker. That voice might be individual or collective, but it strove toward coherence in either case. Postmodern poets, in contrast, valued defamiliarized, deconstructed identities as likelier paths to liberation. These poets viewed efforts to construct a coherent identity or narrative (or a narrative of identity) as new forms of entrapment that unnecessarily reduced what was plural, such as reality and the self, to a singular form.
Recent African American poets have had to negotiate conflicting modes of oppositional writing inherited from a distilled version of the Black Arts movement on the one hand, and from language writing and avant-garde traditions on the other. Harryette Mullen, among other poets, finds the conventionalized voice of black experience prescriptive and resists that conception of the tradition. She argues that the canonical expectation that poets write to, for, and about black readers in an authentic black voice limits individual poets as well as the growing literary tradition. A predominant emphasis on orality not only limits contemporary writers' notions of artistic possibilities and overlooks past writers who resisted dominant trends, but also causes each generation to think it must invent alternatives from scratch: "because this information is missing, each time someone is doing work that is considered innovative, it seems to come out of nowhere . . . [so] innovative black poets don't seem to have any black antecedents."31 Advocates of "postmodern blackness" are working to assemble and analyze that alternative black tradition. This work will not only expand the current canon retroactively; it will also help establish the lineage and future for innovative writing.
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