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Reading Race
Don Mee Choi, Youna Kwak, Caitie Moore
New York University
Although it could be said that poetry seeks to speak to the particular in the universal and the universal in the particular, issues of race confuse this aim. Does race belong to the particular or to the universal? How can poets speak and reveal themselves as inhabiting, engaging with, expressing race? How can race speak and how is it understood?
We propose a collaborative reading and discussion that examines reading practices through the lens of race. We find the current discussion of race in poetry places disproportionate emphasis on writing and producing, while de-emphasizing the role reading plays in gathering and illuminating poetic issues. If writingpractices are informed by race, as we believe they must be, so too are reading practices. Is there such a thing as“racialized reading”? Is race that which is most difficult for a reader to understand, or is it rather, to paraphase the Tao Te Ching, those words that are easiest to understand and yet remain constantly misunderstood? We do not understand our identities as structurally antagonistic positions, but rather different vantage points in Morrison’s ‘shareable imaginative worlds’. From our singular perspectives, we employ multiple strategies for interpreting across race lines, including close-readings, reparative-readings, decoding,deconstruction, skepticism, and performance. By way of introduction to our individual poetry readings, we will present sections from a collaborative work that explores how we read each other, as friends, poets, comrade-in-arms, and critical thinkers. This collaboration will be a starting-point for a discussion of the intersection between race and reading practices.
