In "Fettered Genius, " Keith D. Leonard identifies how African
American poets' use and revision of traditional poetics constituted
an antiracist political agency. Comparing this practice to the use
of poetic mastery by the ancient Celtic bards to resist British
imperialism, Leonard shows how traditional poetics enable African
American poets to insert racial experience, racial protest, and
African American culture into public discourse by making them
features of validated artistic expression. As with the Celtic
bards, these poets' artistry testified to their marginalized
people's capacity for imagination and reason within and against the
terms of the dominant culture.
In an ambitious survey that moves from slavery to the cultural
nationalism of the 1960s, Leonard examines numerous poets, placing
each in the context of his or her time to demonstrate the
antiracist meaning of their accomplishments. The book offers new
insight on the conservatism of Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence
Dunbar, and the genteel members of the Harlem Renaissance, how
their rage for assimilation functioned to refute racist notions of
difference and, paradoxically, to affirm a distinctive racial
experience as valid material for poetry. Leonard also demonstrates
how the more progressive and ethnically distinctive poetics of
Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden,
and Melvin B. Tolson share some of the same ambivalence about
cultural achievement as those of the earlier poets. They also have
in common the self-conscious pursuit of an affirmation of the
African American self through the substitution of African American
vernacular language and cultural forms for traditional poetic
themes and forms. The evolution of these poetics parallels the
emergence of notions of ethnic identity over racial identity and,
indeed, in some ways even motivated this shift.
Leonard recognizes poetic mastery as the African American bardic
poet's most powerful claim of ethnic tradition and of social
belonging and clarifies the full hybrid complexity of African
American identity that makes possible this political
self-assertion. The development that is traced in Fettered Genius
illustrates nothing less than the defining artistic coherence and
political significance of the African American poetic
tradition.
General
Imprint: |
University of Virginia Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
December 2005 |
First published: |
December 2005 |
Authors: |
Keith D Leonard
|
Dimensions: |
158 x 230 x 17mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
256 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-8139-2506-6 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-8139-2506-1 |
Barcode: |
9780813925066 |
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