Towards post-blackness: a critical study of the poetry of Rita Dove

Abstract

Post-Blackness is a movement that began in the visual arts towards the end of the twentieth century. Like most Black movements, the epicentre of this movement too was Harlem. Defined as an “un-naming” that aimed at refuting labels, it deconstructed Black aesthetics to identify gaps that had allowed Blackness to turn into a hegemonic tool towards the end of the century. This thesis studies how Post-Blackness has metamorphosed into a literary and philosophical movement that uses imagery to deconstruct established notions of Blackness and the Black aesthetic. It traces how the emergence of postethnicity in the 1990s called for a need to replace the static concept of identity with the postmodern fluidity of affiliations across ethnic and racial borders in the United States. In 1995, David A. Hollinger posited that race presented Americans with a Hobson’s choice of identity in contemporary America, a fixity which was untenable in a postmodern world. This followed the observation by critics like Stuart Hall that race was an unavoidable cultural construct that functioned as a “floating signifier,” changing its form from the biological to the cultural, to finally become part of what Toni Morrison termed the metaphysical, gaining meaning from inclusion in cultural discourse. Paul Gilroy also said that it was impossible for cultures to remain sealed off from one another, and hence the idea of race was just a way of legitimising power structures. This thesis posits that Post-Blackness originated in the realization of the adaptability of race to remain part of everyday discourse, every attempt to counter it only turning into a hegemonic deepening of its role in defining identities. It traces how the strategic essentialism of the 1960s and the 1970s was realized to be at best a temporary strategy, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak says, prolonging the emphasis on difference only succeeding in marginalizing the community further. Every attempt to counter it resulted in a deepening of binaries, where centre/ margin, self/ other, inside/ outside became fixtures for the construction of identities. Taking as a framework the theories of Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, David A. Hollinger, Richard Dyer and Toni Morrison, the study examines how the Post-Black movement aims at decentering race in cultural discourse by blurring the modernist binaries which inform racial identifiers. Further, stating that race functions as language, it identifies and isolates racialized signifiers from their traditional cultural contexts in an attempt to reformulate their meanings. The thesis will study extensively eight collections of poems by the contemporary African American author, Rita Dove. Although Dove’s work has been studied by critics such as Helen Vendler, Arnold Rampersad, Pat Righelato, Jerzy Kamionowski, and Therese Steffen rom diverse angles such as a reframing of Black aesthetics, the records of a cosmopolitan cultural traveller, a quest for the self as a cultural mulatto, and a need to trace a path back to personal history through the political, there has been little attempt to merge the diverse elements to define her in the African American literary tradition. The thesis will trace Dove’s work, especially her poetry, as part of the Post-Black reformulation of identifiers to reconstitute images in the memory that define identity for the African American, as well as the Black man’s relationship to the history of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. For this purpose, it will identify a clear pattern in Dove’s collections that charts a path for the reformulation of the link between signifiers as used in cultural discourse and the historical associations that give these meaning. Positing that images are more powerful than language, especially in a world where the visual dominates, it traces Dove’s reformulation of the images that inform cultural contexts. The study begins by tracing Dove’s positing of Post-Blackness as a liminal area of existence. It then goes on to trace how she identifies and deconstructs three signifiers which make up racialized structures – history, myth, and music. Stating that all three inform the context in the memory, her poems effect a transatlantic crossing to juxtapose black and white frames in a reformulation that follows Post-Black art’s deconstruction of literary narratives from the past. This juxtaposition of elements from black and white frames exposes the racialized nature of the images in the memory, and also reveals the gaps in metanarratives informed by linguistic structures. The collections taken for study include The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), Museum (1983), Thomas and Beulah (1986), Grace Notes (1989), Mother Love (1995), On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), American Smooth (2004) and Sonata Mulattica: A Life in Five Movements and a Short Play (2009). Although Dove also wrote a play, a novel, a book of short stories, and a book of essays, the study posits that it is in her poems that we see most clearly an affinity with the Post-Black artists through the recurring motif of the traveller positioned on the threshold, allowing her to blur the binaries that give rise to separate frames for both races. In her first collection, The Yellow House on the Corner, Dove follows Langston Hughes and Frederick Douglass to reveal the complex nature of the Du Boisian double consciousness through a literal and metaphoric transatlantic crossing. She then juxtaposes frames that posit myths, trauma and the nature of existence as the same on both sides of the Atlantic, thus revealing how frames have been racialized for both races. Having created a transcultural space that is on the threshold, in a liminal area of existence, she then places in this area carefully chosen objects from history as in a traditional museum. The title of the collection, Museum, is an ironic one because the objects it holds are perhaps the exact opposite of what would be ound in a traditional European museum. The museum in Dove’s collection eschews reverence to both black and white history, identifying with iconic male leaders of the Civil Rights Movement with retrospective irreverence. It ends by revisiting one of the first significant events in Black history, the massacre of more than twenty thousand Haitian workers by the Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo in 1937. Throughout the collection, Dove remains on the threshold to dismantle binaries of good/ bad, inside/ outside as she brings both the victims and the perpetrator into the sphere of the affective. Once a transcultural space has been created, each collection deconstructs the signifiers that make up racialized structures, isolating them from their cultural contexts to reveal the constructed nature of their meanings. Thus, while Thomas and Beulah foregrounds individual lives to deconstruct history as a metanarrative that suppresses these lives as gaps or fissures to present an overarching view of history, On the Bus with Rosa Parks traces history as a process that leads up to a momentous event and continues beyond it. In both these collections, the personal and the political are not treated as disparate moments in time, emphasizing the Post-Black bridging of the two. Grace Notes and Mother Love present myths as part of the anecdotes through which culture is learned, and thus an important signifier in perpetrating its meanings. Positing that myths preclude the acceptance of reality, Dove makes the quest for the Edenic in the spiritual waste land of the twentieth century the subject of Grace Notes. Dove’s use of Biblical figures and Greek myths in her collections has prompted critics like Kamionowski to term her a cosmopolitan, but the study counters this by stating that Dove transposes these on to black life only to trace the point at which the two must diverge. The racialized nature of the myth precludes an acceptance of reality by setting impossible standards as ideals for the black person. Thus, in Mother Love, Demeter must accept that life cannot go back to the pre-traumatic state that existed before her daughter, Persephone, was captured by the God of the Underworld, Hades. The deconstruction of myths is followed by the juxtaposition of twin frames of music to set each free in American Smooth, and prove the interdependent nature of racial existence in Sonata Mulattica. In both the collections, not only does music achieve independent existence as tenor, rather than vehicle, it is through music that the black man finally achieves the ontological freedom to move in and out of racial spaces, an expansiveness that Dove considers to be a prerequisite for Post-Blackness. The two collections also see a redefining of Black aesthetics in the bridging of European forms and black content. While the thesis identifies history, myth and music as the specific signifiers that inform the cultural frames that construct Black identity, it does not state each collection to be specific in its identification of these signifiers. Thus, following Post-Blackness’s acceptance of cultural porosity, the collections also refrain from presenting themselves as sealed areas for the reconstitution of a particular signifier. Dove’s collections exemplify tightness of form with an acceptance of a postmodern uncertainty and a fluidity that encompasses all her poems. In formulating an anti-essentialist reformulation of identity, Dove proposes a new strategy for survival in a postethnic world.