Perry Eleanor. Radical Elegies: White Violence, Patriarchy, and Necropolitics

Many poetry genealogies written over the last few decades trace the elegy from its Ancient Greek origins to its canonical contemporary practitioners. The poets these studies focus on are remarkably consistent, and indeed, the same other poets – racialized, feminized, trans and disabled – are absent in every history. The exclusion of so many elegies from otherwise capacious genealogies is deeply ironic, given the elegy’s function as poetic mourning (Perry 4).

Eleanor Perry’s short and powerful book, Radical Elegies: White Violence, Patriarchy, and Necropolitics, is a rebuttal to this enforced absence, using the framework of necropolitics to conduct close readings of numerous absented poets. Perry studies elegies by racialized, feminized, trans and disabled poets, reworking the distorted frame of literary history and collapsing the genealogical mode through the study of its absences.

Perry shows that when frequently absented poets are studied in elegy collections, it tends to be in a separate section on Black elegies, in which mourning is turned into an innate response from lives predisposed to death, as in the case of Jahan Ramazani’s Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Perry 30–31). The reduction of poetry by racialized and feminized poets to a natural response to unquestioned social contexts removes it from the possibility of having any influence on the form, rendering Black elegies wholly mimetic of the more properly poetic canonical elegy coded as white. While there has been a surge in Black elegy scholarship in recent years (Austin et al.; Bly; Enwezor et al.; Loving), Perry’s careful analysis highlights multiple forms of social difference and the logics that simultaneously coordinate all of these dismissals.

In the first chapter, Perry’s readings of Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton provide full accounts of not only the importance of these poets to the tradition of elegies, but also the complex mechanisms behind their common absence from elegy research. Against the genealogical tradition of literary history, Perry posits that what brings together the poetics of Clifton, Brooks, and Phillis Wheatley is their related use of the elegy, rather than progressive literary time that constitutes an arch-historical development of the elegy form. Their mourning over history is grounded, instead, in the unbearable experience of surviving.

These poets are all finding ways of engaging with the loss of an other and the continuation of the self in the other’s absence. That experience cannot be folded into the simplistic genealogy of a single poetic tradition or any interpoetic anxiety of influence. Nikki Giovanni and June Jordan, in Perry’s reading, are confronting the always inconceivable fact of loss with social anger, political hope, and personal misery. Perry emphasizes that this profound ambivalence disproves the dismissal of Black elegies as a more natural and expected form, given the violence enacted against Black lives in our racist political economy (91–92). The citational politics of elegizing working-class and Black women, in Brooks’ and Clifton’s poetry, and murdered Black public figures, in Giovanni’s and Jordan’s work, refutes the presumption that proximity to and familiarity with death is less overwhelming for any particular group of people (39–40).

The closing point of Chapter One is a long list of multiracial elegists, which is a powerful rebuttal to the exclusionary politics of a genealogical canon (58–59). The choice of which authors to study is brought to the forefront not only theoretically in this book but also in practice, suggesting dozens of poets who are regularly ignored from studies of the elegy. This politics of the syllabus is at its strongest in the third chapter, on trans elegists, where the rejection of genealogy becomes a textual model for the social rejection of binary gender. Refusing the placement of trans identity beside binary gender, Perry maintains that social unities – of gender or any other codifying group logic – are always in flux, so a permanent gendered identity can never become a stable social sign. “As assemblages, these unities are rhizomatic in nature; they are non-hierarchical and nonlinear” (117), which grounds the performance of gender in the same theoretical evasion of chrononormative narrative as Radical Elegies.

Perry maintains that “a tradition of elegy cannot be understood as fixed, monolithic or genealogical; it has many overlapping strands and cannot be represented by a singular or arboreal chronological mapping” (92). Rather than being developmental, Perry shows how African American elegists continually mourn U.S. racism. Perry reads elegies by Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, and Danez Smith that grieve racist murders, while connecting these poems to diverse historical contexts. The poems are placed among American imperial politics (the Vietnam War), anticolonial phenomenology (Frantz Fanon), national police bombings (the MOVE commune in 1980s Philadelphia), the colonial assassination of African politicians (Patrice Lumumba), the racist carceral intentions of conservative antidrug campaigns (Nancy Reagan and “Just Say No”), and multiple murders of Black people by the police (Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner) (92–112).

The binding theoretical background of such disparate critique is Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, which “describes the mechanisms of social and political power whose purpose is to determine ‘who is able to live and who must die’” (Perry 18, Mbembe 66). Perry pursues in the elegy what Mbembe seeks in the “anti-museum,” a space in which the presence of the slave as modernity’s masked counternarrative is always present through “breaking and entering” (Mbembe 172; Perry 154). Perry undermines the presupposed normative computation of properly elegiac subjects and replaces it with a “radical hospitality” maintained through the sociality of mourning (154–155).

Perry uniquely adds to the study of necropolitics by theorizing its agency in the violence of gender through readings of Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Ryka Aoki, and Qwo-Li Driskill. Where heterosexual hegemony has a regulatory function in society, the disposability and proximity to death of individual lives are computed by “queer necropolitics,” which “signifies the condition in which capitalism and its spatialities demarcate certain queer bodies as disposable” (119). This approach understands colonization and “European systems of categorization” (141) as the material foreclosure of embodied Indigenous life, including the Indigenous expression of gender. In this chapter, Perry closely reads the varied writings of Cherokee queer theorist and poet Qwo-Li Driskill, whose poetry engages with Indigenous theory and the experience of the body as the specific situated politics of the Americas and its colonial history. Through Driskill’s poetry and scholarship, Perry theorizes the somatic inscription of normative imperial gender frameworks as “a figurative representation of the psychological effects of deracination and erasure” (142). In both material and embodied form, Driskill presents an opposition to this erasure, opening the marks and scars of Indigenous history as poetry.

Perry’s systematic and clear introduction provides a firm grounding for absented poets to be read carefully and understood as meaningful to the elegiac tradition. There are moments, however, when this clarity slightly simplifies a large problem. Discussing the rise of paid elegies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the implied bourgeois political economy of poetry that emerges in this changing relation to art, Perry makes the interesting point that the poets unable to receive patronage on the grounds of their inherent distance from wealth were largely feminized and working-class poets. This argument is then placed in the broader “economic relations [that] make permissible an understanding of elegy predicated upon principles of capital” (17). With a system of direct monetary exchange for elegies now established, Perry writes, poets produce more elegies to make more money, “which in turn leads to a decrease in the cultural value of the elegy as a whole” (Perry 17). This economic analysis is then used to make claims about society in toto.

And just as in any capitalist model, a ‘free market’ inevitably leads to monopoly capitalism. And monopolized capital is stagnating capital, due to a lack of diversity of choice. Thus the ‘English elegy’ […] represents a kind of cultural stagnation. (17)

While economically it would be more accurate to describe the result – though not inevitable as such – of laissez faire capitalism as an oligopoly rather than a monopoly, the greater problem with these large-scale moments of theorization in Radical Elegies is that it distorts an otherwise careful study of poetry by positioning it in a faulty world context. In the above example, a methodical analysis of the particular conditions of poor and working-class feminized elegists is given over to a claim that their subsumption in the relation of wage-labor stagnates their poetry, as capital stagnates in a monopoly. It is difficult to justify either of these claims, though. For as long as capital is either in circulation or stored as fixed capital in machines and property, it cannot stagnate, and oligopolies function specifically to maintain the circulation of capital in the grasp of capitalists. Moreover, a necessary relation between increased elegy production and decreased elegy quality is an unsubstantiated claim.

At its broadest theoretical scale, this monograph is a feminist analysis of the emotive semantics of poetic language. While Perry is at times concerned with the lives of poets and the gendering and racializing movements of society outside the text, what works best about Radical Elegies is that the poetic text is always before the social as both the premise and the telos of critique. For Perry the elegy is both an agent in the creation of violent social differentiation according to gender and race, and the means by which a feminist poetics can disrupt the normative expectations of texts and their function in the public imaginary.

The feminist elegy is described convincingly here as a radical political tool for thinking the constitution of gender, race, sexuality, and ability differently, without the foreclosure of mourning as an exclusively white male activity. It is this simultaneous dedication to both the text as a way of knowing the world and the world as a way of knowing the text that makes Radical Elegies not only an astute literary study but a radical elegy in itself, grieving the historical loss of what could always have been radical about mourning, if the poetics of grieving feminists had not been subsumed into the dominating form of a racializing and gendering genealogy of poetry.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).