Ballad Poetics in the Era of Black Lives Matter

Abstract

Abstract This essay approaches ballads as a vital cultural form for dramatizing the histories and social meanings of racial conflict in the US, turning to a series of recent poems written alongside the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. This archive of poems draws attention to recursive racial divisions as they emerge anew in a calamitous event, highlighting themes of anonymity and hypervisibility, motion and arrest, the violent imposition of carceral order, and the insurrectionary prospects of its refusal. Examining the ways a range of Black poets have been drawing on features associated with ballads, this essay considers how these writers recount the stories and scenes of Ferguson and other now-famous locales of anti-Black state violence and community uprising. With their narratives of common persons subjected to surveillance, exposure, and acts of violence, these poems further the social imaginaries and storytelling mode of the ballad to consider continuing forms of racial injustice and new eruptions of protest in the present.The archive of Black poetic works I consider pursues more oppositional orientations, keyed to the insurgent energy of the streets as well as to the layered practices of Black revisionary ballad and the material histories they encode.