Radical Poetics
Essays on Literature & Culture
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Literature has the power to help build a shelter in language for a way of being that holds integrity and love as its root. In the tradition of Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and many other Black writers and theorists, poet and professor Khadijah Queen observes questions of life and literature, human feeling and behavior, and explores language-based solutions to common cultural conflicts that are often rooted in harmful assumptions.
Instead of operating from a base of unquestioned thought and systemic tradition, Radical Poetics presents more inclusive and accurate ways of contemplating literary work. Building on ideas and theoretical practices from Édouard Glissant, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Saidiya Hartman, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, Queen reads for where love is present as well as for where it is absent—tracing systems of thought and aesthetic choices to track how characters are portrayed in terms of race, gender, class, and disability. She analyzes short stories, novels, nonfiction narratives, poetry, and a play from authors such as Herman Melville, Kate Chopin, Dionne Brand, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Natasha Trethewey, and Muriel Rukeyser. Queen’s essays offer shifts in thinking about language—beyond calling out the ways language punishes vulnerability, entrenches harm, and suppresses true intercultural communication. Her intuitive approach aims to correct inaccuracies that have served as a foundation for the discriminatory thinking that undergirds American institutions and culture, particularly the continued glorification of violence. Radical Poetics makes a case for the imperative and practical value of understanding poetics beyond artistic and academic spaces and into everyday life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This piquant treatise from poet Queen (Anodyne) makes the case for adopting a method of literary analysis she calls "radical poetics," which "urges the mind toward truth via feeling." Radical poetics should focus on love and its absence, Queen contends, positing that the lack of love with which Ralph Ellison treats the female characters in his novel Invisible Man reveals them to be little more than "thin archetypes." Proposing that intuition can serve as a valuable form of knowledge, Queen cites as a model the ways in which the archivist figure in Dionne Brand's poem The Blue Clerk uses imagination and intuition to compensate for the paucity of historical evidence about Black lives during the transatlantic slave trade. Elsewhere, Queen defends Muriel Rukeyser's assertion that poetry and science share a commitment to "inquiry, imagination, and feeling," and argues that Natasha Trethewey's poems are "palimpsestic, asserting the speaker's memories and observations while erasing what may have previously been accepted." Though the scholarly prose can be tough going and a chapter recounting Queen's disillusionment with the restrictive bureaucracy of academia feels out of place, her call to foreground the subjective experiences of characters and readers in literary criticism is thought-provoking. English students and scholars will find plenty of food for thought.
