The Negative Space of Poetry: Political Emotions, Race, and Self-Representation in Contemporary America

诗歌的负空间：当代美国的政治情绪、种族和自我表征

• 批准号: 2413793
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Edinburgh
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2020 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2413793
• 关键词: Negative; Space; Poetry; Political; Emotions

My research questions the cultural currency of emotions as they influence feelings of national belonging in America. It considers how the promotion of 'positive' feelings like patriotism encourages the rejection of anything potentially conflicting - including non-white individuals whose racialized inequality symbolises the fallibility of America's democratic ideals. Articulating an emerging push by contemporary minority writers to reframe negative emotions as tools of protest, it asks how intersections between poetry and politics can impact self-representation and social inclusion. This project commences by reviewing its theoretical framework, affect theory, considering how subjective encounters alternately bind and estrange individuals from their social worlds. Critical race theory will be interwoven, enlightening how feelings of belonging as a citizen are shaped by racial inequality, to better understand motivations behind immediate Black Lives Matter and anti-immigration protests. It emphasises affect scholars Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant's work on 'cruel' optimism, wherein socially-impelled feelings like patriotism direct positive emotions towards unachievable ideals, undermining self-perceptions of one's social value when they fail. It progresses my earlier research on the social currency of optimism and pessimism, promoting a reconceptualisation of ostensibly negative feelings as authentic, cathartic responses to persecution that liberate individuals from conforming to oppressive power-structures. This thesis hence articulates a nascent effort in contemporary US poetics to reimagine the dichotomy between positive and negative emotions. This research also introduces the artistic notion of 'negative' or empty space to explore poetic intersections between aesthetics and politics, drawing on the ostensible nihility of negative emotions as a site for radical self-representation outwith exclusionary cultural norms. This will be considered in terms of poetic materiality, and how experiments with the visual presentation of poetry, like negative space on the page, enhance opportunities for creative expression. As Keats espoused the need for precarity, or 'negative capability', in creating art, this imminent poetic trend will be traced to its earlier Romantic origins, and further contextualised by twentieth century movements like the Dark Room Collective and the still-operating Cave Canem. This will establish a genealogy of canonically marginalised avant-garde poets of colour, past and present, comparing their literary experimentations through subversions of archetypal forms, hybridised prose-poetry, and new multimedia and performance genres. My primary analysis will form two broad chapters. The first explores negative space literally and figuratively in works by Black American poets Terrance Hayes, Danez Smith, Jericho Brown, and Tracy K. Smith; the second via Native American and immigrant/second-generation poets Joy Harjo, Sherwin Bitsui, Layli Long Soldier, Ocean Vuong, and Jenny Xie. Throughout, I address T.S. Palmer's Afropessimist notion that Black American affect is impossible due to the trauma of slavery and ongoing racial inequality. This will become a matrix for interpreting affect in indigenous and other non-white American identities, and in intersectional readings considering the cultural associations between femininity and homosexuality and emotional excess. Close readings of these poets emphasise the need to reinterpret affective orientations, as they oscillate between positivity and negativity in response to competing public/communal and personal/individual emotions, while ultimately seeking alternative communities outwith the paradigm of the 'nation'. This project aims to locate an emerging literary trend within the work of critically unexamined writers, enabled by poetry's distinct union of aesthetics and emotions, that enriches our understanding of communal self-representations in present-day America.

我的研究质疑情绪的文化流通，因为它们影响了美国的民族归属感。它考虑了如何促进“积极”的感情，如爱国主义鼓励拒绝任何潜在的冲突-包括非白人个人的种族不平等象征着美国的民主理想的错误。它阐述了当代少数民族作家将负面情绪重新定义为抗议工具的新兴推动力，并询问诗歌与政治之间的交叉如何影响自我表达和社会包容。这个项目首先回顾了它的理论框架，影响理论，考虑如何主观的遭遇交替绑定和疏远个人从他们的社会世界。关键的种族理论将交织在一起，启发作为一个公民的归属感是如何由种族不平等形成的，以更好地理解直接黑人生命问题和反移民抗议背后的动机。它强调了影响学者Sara Ahmed和Lauren Berlant关于“残酷”乐观主义的工作，其中社会推动的情感，如爱国主义，将积极的情绪引向无法实现的理想，当他们失败时，破坏了对社会价值的自我认知。它推进了我早期对乐观主义和悲观主义的社会货币的研究，促进了表面上消极情绪的重新概念化，作为对迫害的真实宣泄反应，将个人从压迫性的权力结构中解放出来。因此，本文阐述了当代美国诗学中重新构想积极情感和消极情感之间的二分法的新生努力。本研究还引入了“消极”或空白空间的艺术概念，以探索美学与政治之间的诗意交叉点，利用消极情绪的表面虚无作为激进的自我表现的场所，超越了排他性的文化规范。这将被认为是在诗意的物质方面，以及如何与诗歌的视觉呈现实验，如页面上的负空间，提高创造性表达的机会。由于济慈在艺术创作中支持对不稳定性或“消极能力”的需求，这一即将到来的诗歌趋势将追溯到其早期的浪漫主义起源，并通过20世纪的运动如暗室集体和仍在运作的Cave Canem进一步语境化。这将建立一个谱系的规范边缘化的先锋派诗人的颜色，过去和现在，比较他们的文学实验，通过颠覆原型形式，混合散文诗，新的多媒体和性能类型。我的主要分析将分为两大章。第一部分从字面上和比喻上探讨了美国黑人诗人特伦斯·海耶斯、丹尼兹·史密斯、杰里科·布朗和特雷西·K·卡耐基的作品中的负空间。史密斯;第二个通过美国土著和移民/第二代诗人乔伊·哈乔，舍温·比特苏，莱利·朗·士兵，海洋·旺和珍妮·谢。在整个过程中，我向T. S.帕尔默的非洲悲观主义观点认为，由于奴隶制的创伤和持续的种族不平等，美国黑人的影响是不可能的。这将成为一个矩阵解释影响土著和其他非白人美国身份，并在交叉阅读考虑女性气质和同性恋和情感过剩之间的文化关联。对这些诗人的仔细阅读强调了重新解释情感取向的必要性，因为他们在积极性和消极性之间摇摆，以应对竞争的公共/社区和个人/个人情绪，同时最终寻求替代社区与“国家”的范式。该项目旨在通过诗歌独特的美学和情感结合，在未经批判的作家的作品中找到一种新兴的文学趋势，丰富了我们对当今美国社区自我表达的理解。