Pitfalls of Prestige: Black Women and Literary Recognition
Autor Laura Elizabeth Vranaen Limba Engleză Hardback – 8 noi 2024
From 1987, when Rita Dove won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, to 2021, when Amanda Gorman skyrocketed to celebrity status after performing during Biden’s inauguration and the Super Bowl, Black women have seemingly attained secure, stable positions at the forefront of American poetry. But this prominence comes at a price. As figures like Dove and Elizabeth Alexander have become well known, receiving endorsements and gaining visible platforms from major prizes, academic institutions, and publishing houses, the underlying terms of evaluation that greet Black women’s poetics often remain superficial, reflecting efforts to co-opt and contain rather than meaningfully consider new voices and styles. In Pitfalls of Prestige, Laura Elizabeth Vrana surveys how developments in American literary institutions since 1980 have shaped—and been shaped by—Black women poets. Grappling with the refulgent works of the most acclaimed contemporary figures alongside those of lesser-known poets, Vrana both elucidates how seeming gestures of inclusion can actually result in constraining Black women poets’ works and also celebrates how these writers draw on a rich lineage and forge alternative communities in order to craft continually innovative modes of transgressing such limits, on the page and in life.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814215753
ISBN-10: 0814215750
Pagini: 236
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.48 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814215750
Pagini: 236
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.48 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“Few scholars have so convincingly dissected the logic and the priorities by which awards-granting institutions distribute prestige, and none has done so while also providing the incisive close readings of complex, challenging poetry that Vrana has here. Pitfalls of Prestige is an impressive achievement.” —Keith D. Leonard, author of Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights
“Vrana documents the poetic lineages that Black women construct as they navigate the politics of the contemporary poetry landscape, and pressures the false binary between ‘formalist’ and ‘experimental’ verse. Pitfalls of Prestige is a compelling read that will significantly enhance scholarly understandings of contemporary Black women’s poetry.” —Emily Ruth Rutter, author of The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry
Notă biografică
Laura Elizabeth Vrana is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Alabama. She coedited The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas and has published on contemporary Black poetics, including in anthologies such as Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka and Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era.
Extras
Exploring contemporary African American women’s poetry, Pitfalls of Prestige does not set out to determine whether these are, indeed, the poems to remember. Instead, it engages two constellations of related questions: “Who determines whether these are the poems to remember? How do they exercise this force? In what ways do they encourage recalling chosen texts?” and “Who therefore remembers these poems? Why and how do they remember them?” Such mediators formulate an archetypal Black female poet through how/why they vaunt certain poets as (implicitly) worth remembering. This book analyzes how the three intertwined, intimately interdependent consecratory institutions that shape all American poetry—awards-granting, academic, and publishing—specifically impact Black women, whose odds of attaining visibility prove trebly disadvantaged by race, gender, and genre. Through elaborate, often invisible bureaucratic systems, these institutions adjudicate much about poetic reputation and success. From perches within such sanctioning bodies, like Vendler’s at Harvard, arbiters of various types (scholars, agents, prize juries, reviewers, and poets themselves) circulate symbolic capital; under their auspices, specific authors are extended prestige and others excluded, their opportunities foreclosed. This prestige is arbitrary, but the resulting symbolic capital exerts material influence, increasing sales and shaping subsequent career opportunities for and interpretation of awardees.
This book follows much other scholarship in delineating the contemporary as roughly the post-1980 period: it is in these decades that prize-granting, academic, and publishing institutions assumed their current operational guises, consolidated their influence, and enacted their present stance of superficially embracing Black poets. In these years, predominantly white institutions (PWIs) have performed what Rolland Murray terms partial, tepid “‘incorporation’ of African American literature”; and in publishing, Dan Sinykin and Edwin Roland see 1980 as inaugurating a new era of differentiation into conglomerates and nonprofits, significantly recasting the roles available to nonwhite writers. To borrow and adapt Tiana Clark’s phrase from our epigraph, these sites of institutional control are the “things that carry” certain Black women into visibility and prescribe terms to “name” them. While some contemporary African American women’s poetry is receiving critical attention and recognition, too little of this discourse is accounting for a signal, key force these women savvily and with self-awareness write against and amid: the post-1980 institutional landscape that both advances and detracts from their opportunities.
Meaningful, salient scholarship inflected by literary sociological approaches is already critiquing how these institutions impact prose. For instance, Cameron Leader-Picone argues that institutional forces that now frequently perform at least surface-level devotion to elevating fiction by nonwhite authors are simply “instrumentalizing,” not rigorously reading and engaging with, Black artists. Murray similarly asserts that “black representation” (of texts or bodies) as “commodity” now “constitutes the shared language of the marketplace, the academy, and liberal ideology”; this ideology infects prize-granting, academic, and publishing institutions alike. That language and ideology means only certain Black-authored texts are “noticed, purchased, and read” A parallel commodification influences poetry, and this book dismantles the influential but shallow interpretations of contemporary African American women’s poetry that it yields, offering more contextualized, nuanced readings. Anthony Reed argues that “racialized reading,” a praxis rooted in misinterpretation, yields “a selective, occasionally prescriptive account of the project of black aesthetics as one of rejoinder, protest, or commentary, figuring black writing as reactive rather than productive.” I am interested in tracing (and disrupting) the distinct constraints that such racialized reading—applied to many African American authors across gender, genre, and era—produces for contemporary Black female poets.
My major claim is that these literary establishment institutions of prize-granting, academia, and publishing create particular obstacles for Black women, as they construct a version of the visible, metonymic Black female poet useful for their aims and circulate it through rehearsing its terms time and again to conjure what has become the predominant discourse for analyzing contemporary African American women’s poetics. This archetypal formation or constructed Black woman figure is primarily known as a poet, though she typically for income works in academia, wherein she was educated and attained (if she was not raised with) the privileges of the Black professional elite; she creates and innovates only within preapproved boundaries. If she performs properly on these stages—or can be (mis)read as doing so—then she is afforded prestige and may be recalled as significant.
This book follows much other scholarship in delineating the contemporary as roughly the post-1980 period: it is in these decades that prize-granting, academic, and publishing institutions assumed their current operational guises, consolidated their influence, and enacted their present stance of superficially embracing Black poets. In these years, predominantly white institutions (PWIs) have performed what Rolland Murray terms partial, tepid “‘incorporation’ of African American literature”; and in publishing, Dan Sinykin and Edwin Roland see 1980 as inaugurating a new era of differentiation into conglomerates and nonprofits, significantly recasting the roles available to nonwhite writers. To borrow and adapt Tiana Clark’s phrase from our epigraph, these sites of institutional control are the “things that carry” certain Black women into visibility and prescribe terms to “name” them. While some contemporary African American women’s poetry is receiving critical attention and recognition, too little of this discourse is accounting for a signal, key force these women savvily and with self-awareness write against and amid: the post-1980 institutional landscape that both advances and detracts from their opportunities.
Meaningful, salient scholarship inflected by literary sociological approaches is already critiquing how these institutions impact prose. For instance, Cameron Leader-Picone argues that institutional forces that now frequently perform at least surface-level devotion to elevating fiction by nonwhite authors are simply “instrumentalizing,” not rigorously reading and engaging with, Black artists. Murray similarly asserts that “black representation” (of texts or bodies) as “commodity” now “constitutes the shared language of the marketplace, the academy, and liberal ideology”; this ideology infects prize-granting, academic, and publishing institutions alike. That language and ideology means only certain Black-authored texts are “noticed, purchased, and read” A parallel commodification influences poetry, and this book dismantles the influential but shallow interpretations of contemporary African American women’s poetry that it yields, offering more contextualized, nuanced readings. Anthony Reed argues that “racialized reading,” a praxis rooted in misinterpretation, yields “a selective, occasionally prescriptive account of the project of black aesthetics as one of rejoinder, protest, or commentary, figuring black writing as reactive rather than productive.” I am interested in tracing (and disrupting) the distinct constraints that such racialized reading—applied to many African American authors across gender, genre, and era—produces for contemporary Black female poets.
My major claim is that these literary establishment institutions of prize-granting, academia, and publishing create particular obstacles for Black women, as they construct a version of the visible, metonymic Black female poet useful for their aims and circulate it through rehearsing its terms time and again to conjure what has become the predominant discourse for analyzing contemporary African American women’s poetics. This archetypal formation or constructed Black woman figure is primarily known as a poet, though she typically for income works in academia, wherein she was educated and attained (if she was not raised with) the privileges of the Black professional elite; she creates and innovates only within preapproved boundaries. If she performs properly on these stages—or can be (mis)read as doing so—then she is afforded prestige and may be recalled as significant.
Cuprins
Acknowledgments Introduction Remembering the (Re)generations of Black Women’s Poetics Part 1 The Institutions of Prestige Chapter 1 The Color of Prestige Chapter 2 Navigating the Ivory Tower Interlude Part 2 Performance, Poetics, and Publication Chapter 3 Text, Performance, and Embodiment Chapter 4 Experiments in Lyric Chapter 5 Historical Experiments in Representing Slavery Coda Graywolf and the “Post”(-Citizen) Era? Works Cited Index
Descriere
Surveys how developments in American literary institutions since 1980 have shaped—and been shaped by—Black women poets, showing how seeming gestures of inclusion can co-opt or constrain the work.