‘No pictures of you anywhere … You were alive’: Poetic (In)visibility as a Ground for Political Plurality

Abstract

This paper argues that in social circumstances deformed by persistent anti-black racisms, invisibility does not necessarily constitute a failure of recognition or acknowledgment by others. Rather, it comes forth as a protective shield, to resist reductive and objectifying forms of seeing that often result in violence. But such invisibility has its limits. In this paper, I read Incendiary Art (2017) by Patricia Smith, a collection of poems set in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, to interrogate both the limits of such protective invisibility, and the responsibility of the reader to acknowledge the potential violence of their own gaze. I examine the emancipatory political value of the poetic as showing a way towards a transformative engagement with others as ‘who’ they are, and subsequently towards a mutual co-constitution that is at the very heart of actualising a democratic political plurality.