Still Not a British Subject: Race and UK Poetry

Sandeep Parmar

doi:10.16995/bip.3384

Abstract

This article aims to create a set of critical and theoretical frameworks for reading race and contemporary UK poetry. By mapping histories of 'innovative' poetry from the twentieth century onwards against aesthetic and political questions of form, content and subjectivity, I argue that race and the racialised subject in poetry are informed by market forces as well as longstanding assumptions about authenticity and otherness. Lyric violence, lyric dread and whiteness inform a reading of the lyric as universally exclusive of non-white poets and any responsibility to the social functions of poetry. Ultimately, in line with the essays in this special issue, the article argues for an expansion of the definition of innovative or avant-garde to account for challenges to the expressive and individual lyric mode posed by poets of colour.

Highlights

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By mapping histories of ‘innovative’ poetry from the twentieth century onwards against aesthetic and political questions of form, content and subjectivity, I argue that race and the racialised subject in poetry are informed by market forces as well as longstanding assumptions about authenticity and otherness
Lyric dread and whiteness inform a reading of the lyric as universally exclusive of non-white poets and any responsibility to the social functions of poetry

Summary

Race and Lyric Authenticity

The complexities of authenticity in poetry are manifold and it is not my aim to argue for authenticity in the contested and constructed space of poetic language I am interested in how an idea of the ‘authentic’ is applied to writers of colour and by whom. Timothy Yu argues that some Asian American poets are read as ‘recognizably “experimental”’, Asian American poetry since the 1970s was an avant-garde ‘grouping that defined itself not just through race but through bold experiments with form and style in the search for an Asian American aesthetic.’[33] Yu’s analysis engages with redefinitions of the avant-garde as white where no such centrality existed from modernism to the present In these contexts, and in post-imperial Britain where colonial history remains invisible or uninterrogated, many poets continue to carry the weight of their ethnic difference as subjects situated in the minority against a national culture that has not addressed its legacy of systemic violence. The ‘not-I’—for which lyric reaches and from which lyric descends—is an idealised self whose authentic image disrupts the surface of inherited poetic language

The Role of the Poetry Critic

Lyric Dread and Whiteness

Findings

Lines of Flight