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Engaging Urgency: Articulation of the Polysemous Self
Michelle Naka Pierce,Ella Longpre, Amanda [Ngoho] Reavey, Sarah Richards Graba, Ellie Swensson
Naropa University
When one writes racial otherness into subjectivity, the sign is often complicated by the construction of identities (race, gender, orientation) within the binary debate. The discourse is further complicated by the performative utterance: In “Poetry and Identity,” Harryette Mullen sheds light on the strain between innovative writing and race: “the dilemma is similar to the conflict Ron Silliman discusses in The New Sentence between ‘codes of oppressed peoples’ (a poetry with its own urgent aesthetics…) and so-called purely aesthetic schools (whose aesthetic mode itself can be read as a social code and an ideological weapon).”
This panel will interrogate the codes of the oppressed: aesthetics of fragmentation, polysemous selves, language and diaspora. We will examine how poetic voices reshape and transform language in shifting subjectivities. The spaces between “urgent aesthetics” and “ideological weapons” will be taken up in order to reduce essentialized distortions and to develop the liminal—how writers occupy the boundary/threshold and how the position of liminality further modifies subjectivity. We will consider, as Ronaldo Wilson reminds us, how “multiple forms and approaches to thinking about race, sexuality, and representation activate in the face of violation, silence, terror, and the press of stereotype.” How does the ideological weapon necessitate or inform an articulation, a response? Finally, we will embrace the problematized narrative mode of the polyvocal text and forward the tendency toward rupture rather than resolution.
