When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (Dalkey Archive Scholarly Series)
Jul 2010 · Dalkey Archive Press
Ebook
160
Pages
Tools
info
About this ebook
Lyrical, provocative, and highly original—a groundbreaking book by one of America’s smartest young poet-critics.In When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness, Rowan Ricardo Phillips pushes African American poetry to its limits by unraveling “our desire to think of African American poetry as African American poetry.” Phillips reads African American poetry as inherently allegorical and thus “a successful shorthand for the survival of a poetry but unsuccessful shorthand for the sustenance of its poems.” Arguing in favor of the “counterintuitive imagination,” Phillips demonstrates how these poems tend to refuse their logical insertion into a larger vision and instead dwell indefinitely at the crux between poetry and race, “where, when blackness rhymes with blackness, it is left for us to determine whether this juxtaposition contains a vital difference or is just mere repetition.”
From When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness:
Phillis Wheatley, like the epigraphs that writers fit into the beginning of their texts, is first and foremost a cultural sign, a performance. It is either in the midst of that performance (“at a concert”), or in that performance’s retrospection (“in a cafe?”), that a retrievable form emerges from the work of a poet whose biography casts a far longer shadow than her poems ever have. Next to Langston Hughes, of all African American poets Wheatley’s visual image carries the most weight, recognizable to a larger audience by her famed frontispiece, her statue in Boston, and the drama behind the publication of her book, Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral. All of this will be fruit for discussion in the pages that follow. Yet, I will also be discussing the proleptic nature with which African American literature talks, if you will, Phillis Wheatley.
From When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness:
Phillis Wheatley, like the epigraphs that writers fit into the beginning of their texts, is first and foremost a cultural sign, a performance. It is either in the midst of that performance (“at a concert”), or in that performance’s retrospection (“in a cafe?”), that a retrievable form emerges from the work of a poet whose biography casts a far longer shadow than her poems ever have. Next to Langston Hughes, of all African American poets Wheatley’s visual image carries the most weight, recognizable to a larger audience by her famed frontispiece, her statue in Boston, and the drama behind the publication of her book, Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral. All of this will be fruit for discussion in the pages that follow. Yet, I will also be discussing the proleptic nature with which African American literature talks, if you will, Phillis Wheatley.
Lyrical, provocative, and highly original—a groundbreaking book by one of America’s smartest young poet-critics.In When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness, Rowan Ricardo Phillips pushes African American poetry to its limits by unraveling “our desire to think of African American poetry as African Ame...
About the author
Rowan Ricardo Phillips was born in New York City. He is the author of When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness, as well as numerous essays, poems, and translations. He has taught at Harvard and Columbia, and is currently an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Poetry Center at the State University of New York at Stony Brook University.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips was born in New York City. He is the author of When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness, as well as numerous essays, poems, and translations. He has taught at Harvard and Columbia, and is currently an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Poetry Center at the State...
Rate this ebook
Tell us what you think.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
