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

我的研究质疑情绪的文化通货，因为它们影响着美国的国家归属感。它考虑了爱国主义等积极情绪的提升如何鼓励拒绝任何潜在的冲突--包括非白人个人，他们的种族主义不平等象征着美国民主理想的易错性。它阐明了当代少数族裔作家正在兴起的将负面情绪重新构建为抗议工具的努力，询问诗歌和政治之间的交集如何影响自我表现和社会包容。这个项目首先回顾了它的理论框架，影响理论，考虑到主观遭遇是如何交替地将个人与他们的社会世界联系在一起和疏远的。批判性种族理论将交织在一起，启发人们作为公民的归属感如何受到种族不平等的影响，以更好地理解迫在眉睫的黑人生活也是如此，以及反移民抗议背后的动机。它强调影响学者萨拉·艾哈迈德和劳伦·伯兰特关于“残酷的”乐观主义的研究，即爱国主义等社会驱使的情绪将积极情绪导向无法实现的理想，在失败时破坏对自己社会价值的自我认知。它推进了我早期对乐观和悲观这一社会通货的研究，推动了对表面上的负面情绪的重新概念化，将其视为对迫害的真实、宣泄的反应，将个人从顺从于压迫的权力结构中解放出来。因此，这篇论文阐述了当代美国诗学中重新想象积极情感和消极情感之间的二分法的初步努力。本研究还引入了“负面”或空白空间的艺术概念，以探索美学和政治之间的诗意交集，利用负面情绪表面上的虚无作为激进自我表现的场所，而不是排外的文化规范。这将从诗歌的物质性以及如何试验诗歌的视觉呈现，如页面上的负空间，增加创造性表达的机会来考虑。由于济慈主张在创作艺术时需要有超前的能力，或者说“消极的能力”，这一迫在眉睫的诗歌趋势将追溯到它更早的浪漫主义起源，并被20世纪的运动进一步联系起来，如黑屋集体运动和仍在运作的洞穴卡纳姆运动。这将建立一个典型的被边缘化的前卫彩色诗人的谱系，过去和现在，通过颠覆原型形式，混合散文-诗歌，以及新的多媒体和表演流派来比较他们的文学实验。我的主要分析将形成两个大的章节。第一个是从字面上和比喻上探索美国黑人诗人特伦斯·海斯、达尼兹·史密斯、杰里科·布朗和特蕾西·K·史密斯的作品中的负面空间；第二个是通过美国原住民和移民/第二代诗人喜悦·哈乔、舍温·碧翠、莱利·朗·士兵、海洋旺和谢珍妮的作品。自始至终，我都在驳斥T·S·帕尔默的非洲悲观主义观点，即由于奴隶制和持续的种族不平等的创伤，美国黑人的影响是不可能的。这将成为一个矩阵，用来解释土著和其他非白人美国人身份的影响，以及考虑到女性特质、同性恋和情感过度之间的文化联系的交叉阅读。对这些诗人的细读强调了重新解释情感取向的必要性，因为他们在积极和消极之间摇摆，以回应相互竞争的公共/社区和个人/个人情感，同时最终寻求替代社区，而不是“国家”的范式。这个项目的目的是在未经批判性审查的作家的作品中定位一种新兴的文学趋势，这是由于诗歌独特的美学和情感的结合，丰富了我们对当今美国公共自我表现的理解。

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.