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流通，因为它们影响了美国人的民族归属感。它考虑了爱国主义等“积极”情感的推广如何鼓励人们拒绝任何潜在的冲突——包括非白人个体，他们的种族化不平等象征着美国民主理想的不可靠性。它阐述了当代少数族裔作家将负面情绪重新定义为抗议工具的新趋势，并探讨了诗歌与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——情感理论，考虑了主观遭遇是如何将个人与他们的社会世界联系在一起或疏远的。批判性的种族理论将交织在一起，揭示作为公民的归属感是如何被种族不平等塑造的，以更好地理解当下“黑人的命也重要”和反移民抗议背后的动机。它强调了影响学者萨拉·艾哈迈德和劳伦·伯兰特关于“残酷的”乐观主义的研究，其中社会驱动的情感，如爱国主义，将积极情绪引向无法实现的理想，当他们失败时，会破坏一个人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流通的研究，促进了表面上的负面情绪的重新概念化，将其视为对迫害的真实、宣泄性反应，将个人从服从压迫性权力结构中解放出来。因此，本文阐明了当代美国诗学中重新想象积极和消极情绪之间二分法的新生努力。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，利用消极情绪表面上的虚无作为排除文化规范的激进自我表现的场所。这将考虑到诗歌的物质性，以及诗歌的视觉呈现的实验，如页面上的负空间，如何增加创造性表达的机会。正如济慈支持在艺术创作中需要不稳定，或“消极能力”，这种即将到来的诗意趋势将追溯到其早期的浪漫主义起源，并进一步被20世纪的运动所背景，如暗室集体和仍在运营的洞穴Canem。这将建立一个传统边缘化的先锋派诗人的谱系，过去和现在，通过对原型形式的颠覆，混合散文诗，以及新的多媒体和表演类型来比较他们的文学实验。我的主要分析将分为两章。第一部分从字面上和比喻上探讨了美国黑人诗人特伦斯·海斯、达内兹·史密斯、杰里科·布朗和特雷西·k·史密斯的作品中的消极空间；第二个是通过美国原住民和移民/第二代诗人Joy Harjo， Sherwin Bitsui, Layli Long Soldier， Ocean Vuong和Jenny Xie。自始至终，我都在谈论T.S.帕尔默的非洲悲观主义观点，即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。这将成为解释土著和其他非白人美国人身份中的情感的矩阵，并在交叉阅读中考虑到女性气质与同性恋和情感过剩之间的文化联系。仔细阅读这些诗人强调需要重新解释情感取向，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，同时最终以“国家”的范式寻求替代社区。该项目旨在通过诗歌独特的美学和情感结合，在未经批判性审查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.