| This dissertation provides an analysis of place and movement in modern and contemporary African American poetry. This work attempts to discover how spatial issues in poetry work in the construction and transmission of various identifications to, in, and about black communities. In an attempt to discover a useable map of “Black” poetics or prosody, this study begins with its own preface followed by a review of prefaces and introductions to Black literary anthologies of the twentieth century. This reading of prefaces demonstrates the utility of reading figures of place and movement in African American poetry. Because so many of these introductions were written by major Negro poets, the struggle to find just the right way to locate the anthologies in the American and Negro cultural landscapes reveals much of what we need to know about the terrain before embarking on an attempt to chart it.; The subsequent chapters address major historical and sociological movements and locations that can also be read as major figures in African American poetry: the Middle Passage, the Great Migration, sexual expatriation, and death. The study primarily focuses on the three most critical to the construction and articulation of racial identity and identifications in the United States then examines them in the context of Black poetic production. In the course of reading poems and poets through the above spaces, this study will unfold a map of Black poetics that complicates and challenges prevailing black literary histories. To both broaden critical study of African American poetry and to limit the study to a somewhat manageable chronology, the study will concentrate on post-World War II poetry. However, this choice does not signify a decision to privilege the Black Arts Movement as the focal point of this work. Rather because of this choice, the complexity and variety of Black (Negro, colored, African American and otherwise) poetic output, within and outside of various aesthetic and political movements, can be charted in ways that map out not only a singular authentic Black ground, but multiple paths to multiple “authentic” Black identities. |
