Thinking Its Presence: Race and Creative Writing

History vs. the Counter-Histories of Contemporary Poetry
Carmen Gimenez Smith, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Sarah Vap
Mexico State University, University of Utah, University of Colorado, University of Southern California

This panel will explore expanding tropes of servitude, subjugation, and resistance in contemporary writing often emerging through re-tellings of cultural narratives. While writers like Alicia Ostriker, after H.D., have characterized such re-tellings as revisionist, contemporary writers like Marilyn Nelson situate the text as a counter-narrative that supplants the active cultural authority of previous texts. In this way, this panel means to discuss the potential ways histories may relocate along an axis of alternative narrative and so normalize an expanded dialogue toward servitude, dominion, race, gender, and sex. This reclamation of the narrative imaginary amounts to a shift in what our textual constructions allow us to “see” as history and so mediates Kasha Silverman’s “gaze” and Nick Mirzoeff’s “look,” both of which serve as a visual locus for cultural authority and so power.