Abstract
This article proposes a framework for exploring the role of mobility in the rearticulation of agency relating to white and minority identities in poems by Lisa Suhair Majaj, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Suheir Hammad. In this context, we show how the political poetry of Majaj, Hammad, and Nye employs mobility to destabilize racialized structures and definitions underlying ethnic and white identities and challenge the invisibility of related power hierarchies and hegemonic discursive formations. Through translational representations of mobility, we argue, the poets and poetic subjects unmask racialized locations and map transformative itineraries shaped by choice and affiliation; the resulting identities are constantly negotiated and reshaped in relation to struggle, justice, and global concerns. The examination of mobility in this context also reveals the conditions of existence and circulation of white privilege to unmask its influence on ascriptions of human value and worth.
Highlights
This article proposes a framework for exploring the role of mobility in the rearticulation of agency relating to white and minority identities in poems by Lisa Suhair Majaj, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Suheir Hammad
To understand location as itinerary necessitates the examination of the mechanism of mobility that makes such a reframing of the concept possible; this mechanism is intimately correlated with transformative notions of space since they involve possibilities of dynamic restructuring and translation
In the poetry of Palestinian American Lisa Suhair Majaj, Suheir Hammad, and Naomi Shihab Nye, this complex web of interactions between history, space, identity, and mobility redefines geographic, discursive, and communal locations and revises processes of racialization underlying the formation of communities of white Americans and ethnic minorities
Summary
This article proposes a framework for exploring the role of mobility in the rearticulation of agency relating to white and minority identities in poems by Lisa Suhair Majaj, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Suheir Hammad. This analysis stresses the ways in which mobility impacts the framing of Americanness and its attendant characteristics such as whiteness, masculinity, patriotism, and individualism.1 Permeating this analysis is a reading of affiliation through mobility as an act of personal agency, defined in terms of choice and action, as outlined by Michael Dowdy in his study of American political poetry.2
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