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By situating Baldwin’s Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems in conversation with Jericho Brown’s 2019 poetry collection The Tradition, this article examines the theory of love in their poetic thinking. It argues that in their poetry, love emerges as a multifaceted mode of knowing and feeling, grounded in corporeal intensity and imbued with sociopolitical and historical meanings. Both Baldwin and Brown view love as integral to the understanding of queer sexuality and racial politics, foregrounding at the same time the challenges of loving and being loved in a historically anti-Black society. Their poetics of love coalesces the intellectual and the affective, the erotic and the political, moving beyond the conventions of inward-bound and personal lyric toward what Martinican philosopher and novelist Édouard Glissant termed a “poetics of relation.” Such transgenerational reading also allows us to explore Baldwin’s and Brown’s poetry as acutely attuned to historical moments which seem strikingly similar: Reagan’s and Trump’s presidencies.
This article considers James Baldwin’s last published novel, Just Above My Head (1979), as the culmination of his exploration of kinship, reflecting on the ways distance and loss characterize African-American familial relations. By analyzing Baldwin’s representation of Hall Montana’s relationship to, and mourning of, his younger brother Arthur, this article argues that JAMH revises the terms of the black family to imagine an alternative, errant kinship that is adoptive, migratory, and sustained through songs of joy and grief. My approach to the novel’s portrayal of kinship is indebted to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990), in which he defines “errantry” as a fundamental characteristic of diaspora that resists the claustrophobic, filial violence and territorial dispossession that are slavery’s legacies. Baldwin represents errant kinship in JAMH through his inclusion of music and formal experimentation. Departing from previous scholarship that reads JAMH as emblematic of the author’s artistic decline, I interpret the novel’s numerous syntactic and figurative experiments as offering new formal insight into his portrait of brotherly love. Baldwin’s integration of two distinctive leitmotifs, blood and song, is therefore read as a formal gesture toward a more capacious and migratory kinship.
Casanova in La République mondiale des lettres (1999) and Édouard Glissant in Poétique de la relation (1990) ( Poetics of Relation , 1997). Although French language and culture figure centrally in their work, and although both cast a wide, transnational and relational net, they could not be more different. Casanova’s influential and exhaustive discussion of global twentieth-century literature posits a ‘world literary space’ in which all roads lead into and out of Paris. She presumes a ‘republic of letters’ that is ‘independent of political boundaries’, that operates
At a time when monolingualist claims for the importance of ‘speaking English’ to the national order continue louder than ever, even as language diversity is increasingly part of contemporary British life, literature becomes a space to consider the terms of linguistic belonging. Bad English examines writers including Tom Leonard, James Kelman, Suhayl Saadi, Raman Mundair, Daljit Nagra, Xiaolu Guo, Leila Aboulela, Brian Chikwava, and Caroline Bergvall, who engage multilingually, experimentally, playfully, and ambivalently with English’s power. Considering their invented vernaculars and mixed idioms, their dramatised scenes of languaging – languages learned or lost, acts of translation, scenes of speaking, the exposure and racialised visibility of accent – it argues for a growing field of contemporary literature in Britain pre-eminently concerned with language’s power dynamics, its aesthetic potentialities, and its prosthetic strangeness. Drawing on insights from applied linguistics and translation studies as well as literary scholarship, Bad English explores contemporary arguments about language in Britain – in debates about citizenship or education, in the media or on Twitter, in Home Office policy and asylum legislation – as well as the ways they are taken up in literature. It uncovers both an antagonistic and a productive interplay between language politics and literary form, tracing writers’ articulation of linguistic alienation and ambivalence, as well as the productivity and making-new of radical language practices. Doing so, it refutes the view that language difference and language politics are somehow irrelevant to contemporary Britain and instead argues for their constitutive centrality to the work of novelists and poets whose inside/outside relationship to English in its institutionalised forms is the generative force of their writing.
Bordering intimacy is a study of how borders and dominant forms of intimacy, such as family, are central to the governance of postcolonial states such as Britain. The book explores the connected history between contemporary border regimes and the policing of family with the role of borders under European and British empires. Building upon postcolonial, decolonial and black feminist theory, the investigation centres on how colonial bordering is remade in contemporary Britain through appeals to protect, sustain and make family life. Not only was family central to the making of colonial racism but claims to family continue to remake, shore up but also hide the organisation of racialised violence in liberal states. Drawing on historical investigations, the book investigates the continuity of colonial rule in numerous areas of contemporary government – family visa regimes, the policing of sham marriages, counterterror strategies, deprivation of citizenship, policing tactics, integration policy. In doing this, the book re-theorises how we think of the connection between liberal government, race, family, borders and empire. In using Britain as a case, this opens up further insights into the international/global circulations of liberal empire and its relationship to violence.
reveals the potential for representing a communal process by creating the borders of the self as the borders of a community. Glissant had forewarned that we need to ‘make drastic changes in the diverse sensibilities of communities by putting forward the prospect – or at least the possibility – of this revived aesthetic connection with the earth.’75 He explains that a poetics of relation involves the shared ‘passion for the land where one lives’ lest we end up inhabiting what he describes as a Museum of Natural Non-History, which is where global warming and climate
post-colonial Caribbean poet and theorist, in a short section of his work Poetics of relation (1997), provides a quick analysis of the opacity and its relationship to post-colonial theory and politics. In this short section, he gives a powerful defense for the right to opacity by contrasting it to the Western demand for transparency. “If we examine the process of understanding people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought,” Glissant writes, “we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency” (Glissant, 1997: 190). This idea of making
of urban experience: “In New York or Lagos” [and] “the shantytowns and ghettos of even the smallest cities the same gears engage: the violence of poverty and mud but also an unconscious and desperate rage at not ‘grasping’ the chaos of the world,” Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010), 144, 141. 7 Glissant writes further, “For though this experience made you, original victim floating toward the sea’s abysses, an exception, it became something shared and made us, the descendants, one people
Rights and Social Justice in the Prison Museum’, in J.Wilson, S. Hodgkinson, J. Piché and K. Walby (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 987–1008. 21 R. Simon, ‘The Terrible Gift: Museums and the Possibility of Hope without Consolation’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 21 (2006), 187–204. 22 É. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. by B. Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 [1990]). 23 V. Golding, ‘Creolizing the Museum: Art, Humour, Young Audiences’; V. Golding, ‘Museums, Poetics, Affect’, Feminist
intellectuals, see Paulina L. Alberto and Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, ‘Racial Democracy and Racial Inclusion’, in De la Fuente, Afro-Latin American Studies , pp. 264–316 . 18 Freyre, Masters and Slaves , p. 4. 19 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation , trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997) . 20 Gates, Black in Latin America , p. 44. 21 In his book El engaño