 |
Probing the works of African American poetesses Claudia Rankine Citizen. An American Lyric (2015) and Robin Coste Lewis, The Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems (2015),[1] this paper asks what kind of black feminist theoretical propositions may be said to emerge from these productions. Can these two interventions be placed in relation to contemporary essays that present themselves overtly as theoretical? Saidiya Harman's Lose your Mother. A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2008) and Christiana Sharpe's In the Wake. On Blackness and Being (2017) indeed put forth the tenets and modulations of what has been termed Afro-pessimism from a black feminist perspective (Sexton). The collections question language, feelings, the (im)possibility of "autobiography" in the contemporary lyric poem
[1] The editions used are Claudia Rankine Citizen. An American Lyric. Graywolf, 2015 and Robin Coste Lewis, The Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems. Alfred Knopf, 2015. Hereafter abbreviated as C and S followed by the page number.
