Becoming Academic: US Identity Poetics, 1968-2008

Abstract

Becoming Academic: US Identity Poetics, 1968–2008 documents how poets of color and multiethnic poets developed a broadly influential identity-based poetics between the student rebellions and the global financial crisis. In chapters that trace the development of Black, Puerto Rican, and Jewish poetry during this period, this dissertation argues that the rise of academic identity knowledges, like Black and ethnic studies, played an indispensable practical and symbolic role in enabling new forms of writing by poets from historically marginalized groups. This argument revises longstanding Romantic ideas about the artist as outsider. Leaning on sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the “university field,” a term for the struggles over cultural and economic capital and scientific authority which regularly take place in the spaces and organs of higher education, Becoming Academic shows how, rather than draining poets’ creative ability, entrance to the university field motivated innovations in their writing of and about racial and ethnic identity. Indeed, the story told here, for the first time, about the central role of identity in—and poets’ of color and multiethnic poets’ outsized contribution to—contemporary poetry is part of a larger story of American literary culture’s academicization in the postwar era. From the midcentury on, this dissertation shows, when literary culture gradually lost its ties to newspapers, magazines, commercial publishing, and communal arts spaces and became largely based in institutions of higher education, poets of color and multiethnic poets were protagonists, so to speak, in this transition, whose impact must be registered to grasp the transformations in American poetry of the past half-century.

The literary history of recent American poetry offered by Becoming Academic breaks with familiar accounts of the period (often focused on white poets or perceived literary rebels), while substantiating its novel claims through readings of a wide range of well-known and overlooked literary texts and magazines, alongside correspondence, textbooks, photographs, and course syllabi. Among the poets and publishers whose life and work is analyzed are Miguel Algarín, Sarah Webster Fabio, Aracelis Girmay, C. S. Giscombe, Benjamin Hollander, Nicolás Kanellos, Nathaniel Mackey, David Meltzer, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Jerome Rothenberg, Charles Rowell, Evie Shockley, Nomi Stone, Piri Thomas, and Jay Wright. Above all, Becoming Academic provides a “thick description” of the past half-century of American poetry, piecing together an overall account of the period from the careers and trajectories of publishers, magazines, institutions, and, primarily, poets of color and multiethnic poets and their work.