Decolonize or Destroy: New Feminist Poetry in the United States and Canada

Abstract

This essay points to techniques and strategies in contemporary feminist poetry that primarily seek not to resist or critique frameworks of white supremacy or capitalist imperialism, but to begin from coordinates that, experientially and historically, do not align with the striations of historical time mirrored and institutionalized by these frameworks. The author argues that Marie Annharte Baker's and Dawn Lundy Martin's poems not only orient themselves antagonistically against the very concrete, physical violence of structural domination in the context of histories of slavery and genocide; they also understand that today, as always, ascriptive processes of racialization function to make structural inequality appear inevitable and fair. As such, the author proposes that it is possible to read a lateral solidarity across the work of Annharte and Martin in their joint rejection of the liberal politics of recognition, and through the transformative possibilities of aesthetic experience highlighted by their work, where the material antagonisms structuring contemporary social relations emerge aesthetically too. The author suggests, however, that the object of transformation in Annharte's and Martin's poems is not a ‘thing’, but mediation, given that these works attempt to interrogate and undermine the psycho-affective attachments that, through a contemporary discourse of recognition, actually serve to reproduce colonial structures of domination. In making this claim, the author underlines the ways in which the antagonisms in their work are constitutively and formally different, while in both cases showing how a position of antagonism can be transformative, and potentially revolutionary, in itself.

Keywords:

• Experimental poetry
• Indigenous feminism
• black feminism
• decolonization
• multiculturalism
• gender violence

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Scholarship.

Notes

¹Here I follow Christopher Chen's definition of ‘race’ as ‘the consequence and not the cause of racial ascription or racialisation processes which justify historically asymmetrical power relationships through reference to phenotypical characteristics and ancestry’ (Chen 2013: 207).

²This phrase is cited by Martin as the title of Carrie Mae Weems's 1996 photomontage (Weems 1996).

³The best-known call to these approaches is perhaps Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus's essay, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’ (Best and Marcus 2009). For a thorough and supple critique of this tendency in literary studies, see Lesjak (2013).

⁴This is a conservative police figure and Indigenous communities estimate much higher numbers (see http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/pubs/mmaw-faapd-eng.pdf).

⁵The Kootenay School of Writing was formed in 1984 in Vancouver and, as a non-profit organization, offered courses in writing, editing and publishing; sponsored colloquia and critical talks on writing, visual art and politics; hosted a reading series; and published the influential Writing magazine. The school is associated with writers such as Tom Wayman, Jeff Derksen, Catriona Strang, Colin Browne, Nancy Shaw and Lisa Robertson. For some hesitant observations of Annharte's association with the Kootenay School of Writing, see Weir (2014) and McClellan (2015).

⁶The Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo is an anonymous collective dedicated to the dismantling of white supremacy in US poetry communities and beyond. See http://gringpo.com.

⁷See Chen (2013) and Endnotes 3 more generally on all three of these categories as frameworks for analysis and the objects of a politics of negation.

⁸This photo series can be viewed at http://carriemaeweems.net/galleries/framed.html.