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

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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.