Black bodies black fields(s): 20th century and contemporary poetics of the black body in African American poetry and visual culture
Item
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Title
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Black bodies black fields(s): 20th century and contemporary poetics of the black body in African American poetry and visual culture
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:de585ee68418:10066
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identifier
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10022
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Creator
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Wilson, Ronaldo V.,
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Contributor
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Alexander Meena
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Date
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2009
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American literature | Black studies | Art history | African American Poets | Black Body | Black Visual Culture | Contemporary Black Poetics | Ellen Gallagher | Gwendolyn Brooks
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Abstract
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This dissertation is a contribution to the growing field of black poetics, exploring the obliterated black body and its juncture with poetry and visual art. It examines the black body's construction through a conceptual field that reveals both its violent fragmentation and its difficult repair, leading to a larger exploration of the poetics of the black body in 20th century and contemporary African American Poetry and Visual Culture, primarily, through the work of the poet Gwendolyn Brooks and the artist Ellen Gallagher.;Chapter one, A Bronzeville Mother's Vision: The Visual Poetics of Gwendolyn Brooks and Emmett Till, situates Brooks' poems, "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon" and "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till," against the famous photograph of the fourteen-year-old lynching victim Emmett Till. Ellen Gallagher's early paintings, "Host" and "Blubber," provide the spatial frames crucial in this reading.;Chapter two, Theater-In-Seizing the Black Body: Mourning, Ownership and Display, centers on a postcard of an unnamed black man lynched in an abandon plantation field, prompting this question: Can poetry serve as a space where these violent fields can be articulated? Focusing on Brooks' lynching poem, "Ballad of Pearl May Lee," and Gallagher's painted-sculpture, Preserve, I explore such necessary conceptual forms in the face of the black body's violation.;Chapter three, The Violated Body: Narrative Arc(s) of Possibility , analyzes Hilton Als' reading of lynching photographs in Without Sanctuary. I pair Als' analysis with my own of Amadou Diallo, situating several writers' responses to the black body's violent public spectacle, to include Brooks' autobiographies, as well as work by poets Elizabeth Alexander and June Jordan, and theorists, Kimberly Benston and Fred Moten.;Chapter four, Carrying Hate in Front of You and Harmony Behind: On Process and the Inscrutable Black Body, considers how the black body's narrative might be retrieved through various texts captured in process. I explore a manuscript version of Gwendolyn Brooks' "the children of the poor" through Ellen Gallagher's notion of the "drawn and the printed," while examining the work of contemporary poets, Claudia Rankine, Lucille Clifton, and Dawn Lundy Martin.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
