{"id":31937,"date":"2013-06-26T20:08:59","date_gmt":"2013-06-26T20:08:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=31937"},"modified":"2016-11-01T00:55:35","modified_gmt":"2016-11-01T00:55:35","slug":"some-thoughts-on-biracialism-and-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=31937","title":{"rendered":"Some Thoughts on Biracialism and Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/bostonreview.net\/blog\/some-thoughts-biracialism-and-poetry\" target=\"_blank\">Some Thoughts on Biracialism and Poetry<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/bostonreview.net\" target=\"_blank\">Boston Review<\/a><br \/>\n2013-06-13<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/english.utah.edu\/profile.php?unid=u0398961\" target=\"_blank\">Paisley Rekdal<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of English<br \/>\n<em>University of Utah<\/em><\/p>\n<p>To be a biracial and female writer might suggest one of two things: first, that my gender and race are the subject matter of my work or, second, that the forms of my writing reflect my identity. Between these two possibilities\u2013race and gender as theme versus race and gender as enacted form\u2014a tension exists, perhaps arising from our current distrust of both narrative and identity politics. To write from the first position\u2014race and gender as theme\u2014boils a poem down to the recounting of experience, most likely the narrator\u2019s marginalization. It is an easy poetry to identify, and it is a type whose detractors (rightfully and wrongly) criticize as an attempt to engender in the reader both sympathy with and catharsis through the personal revelations of the narrator. It is a poetry that at its worst risks becoming performative cultural \u201ckitsch\u201d through its manipulation of readers\u2019 sensitivities to race and racism but, at its best, illuminates some part of the complexity currently surrounding ideas of racial authenticity and identification.<\/p>\n<p>The second option\u2014identity as enacted form\u2014is harder to pinpoint, relying as it does as much on the writer\u2019s stated objectives for the work, as on readers\u2019 stereotypes about what kind of poetic form female biracialism could take. On the surface, we might expect \u201cbiracial\u201d forms to be highly skeptical of an imaginatively coherent first person. They could be poems that rely on fragmentation, that are deeply engaged with critical theory regarding perception and language. They could be ironic, self-reflexive, suspicious of catharsis, engaged more with the playful destruction of archetypal myths of identity than in reifying them. In short, they would be hard to distinguish from much of contemporary poetry today&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/bostonreview.net\/blog\/some-thoughts-biracialism-and-poetry\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some Thoughts on Biracialism and Poetry Boston Review 2013-06-13 Paisley Rekdal, Associate Professor of English University of Utah To be a biracial and female writer might suggest one of two things: first, that my gender and race are the subject matter of my work or, second, that the forms of my writing reflect my identity. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,25],"tags":[15035,11064,15037,15036,1133,3075],"class_list":["post-31937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-women","tag-aimee-nezhukumatathil","tag-boston-review","tag-brenda-shaughnessy","tag-monica-ferrell","tag-natasha-trethewey","tag-paisley-rekdal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31937"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42908,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31937\/revisions\/42908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}