Writing Transgressions: Publication Contexts and the Politics of Recognition in Contemporary Black Women's Poetry

Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Vrana, Laura Elizabeth
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- December 06, 2016
- Committee Members:
- Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Shirley Moody-Turner, Committee Member
Linda Ferguson Selzer, Committee Member
Judith Sierra-Rivera, Outside Member - Keywords:
- African American literature
Poetry
Textual studies
American literature
Race
Critical race theory
Gender studies - Abstract:
- The forty-year period since the (at least somewhat) discrete Black Arts Movement has witnessed the splintering of African American literature into countless different directions, sub-areas, and ill-defined movements, precipitating a crisis of terminology in scholarship on contemporary black writing. Yet, simultaneously, those forty years have included significant moments of recognition being granted to black female poets by the academy and from major literary awards such as the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award, and the United States Poet Laureateship, as well as the solidification of African American and black studies programs at colleges and universities. Indeed, the contemporary era of African American literature has centered in part on the flourishing work of black women writing poetry, the metaphorical and literary descendants of foremothers Phillis Wheatley and Gwendolyn Brooks. This project advances a two-part argument about contemporary black female poetics. First, it argues for the importance of discussing the aesthetic multiplicities of contemporary black female poetics together, rather than dividing the field into separately discussed binaries of “traditional” and “experimental.” Second, instead of acquiescing to the dominant assumption that greater presence in universities and the receipt of significant awards represent an unequivocally positive boon for black women writers, this project complicates understandings of the politics of recognition by demonstrating how academic and awards-granting institutions can both enable and constrain the avenues of expression available to these poets. The act of granting this visibility to certain writers over others often becomes a new mode of policing authenticity in black women’s texts, and these high-profile awards can even damage or limit the honored writers’ careers and those of their peers in unexpected ways. Dividing the literary criticism on these wide-ranging poetics into separate camps only further reinforces the legitimating power of those mechanisms. As such, the project brings together in equal parts analyses of better-known “literary” poets, such as Rita Dove and Natasha Trethewey, with analyses of those considered aesthetically marginal, such as Sharon Bridgforth and the (recently) much-lauded Claudia Rankine. Ultimately, this broader analysis and juxtaposition demonstrates the need for both close formal and thoroughly contextual analysis of all the forces that shape visibility for black female poets in the contemporary era of American poetry that is still struggling—as it has done since Wheatley—to determine where black women’s voices fit into a national poetic tradition.