these americas: Black and Indigenous Poetics Exhausting the Human

Abstract

My dissertation maps a poetics of the Americas through the work of Black and Indigenous poets. I draw on a wide array of interdisciplinary perspectives and methodologies to examine lineages of poetic practice in the Americas through their interrelated literary, historical, material, spiritual, and social contexts of production, circulation, and reception in a hemispheric framework. In this I cast the Americas as a meeting place wherein its various senses can defamiliarize, critique, and extend each other within an historicized and historicizing frame that recontextualizes knowledge outside the disciplinary borders of colonial modernity. I explore such themes by linking literary archives normatively separated by approaches that focus on discrete national and linguistic traditions or comparative approaches that exclude questions of coloniality, in each case obscuring the complex, liberatory potential of literary practice. I put Indigenous studies in conversation with a range of related interdisciplines such as Black, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies to map interrelations, shared histories, divergences, and explicit as well as implicit concerns with the Americas as site of struggle. A rigorous attention to the conditions of possibility of Indigenous and Black life is central to this project as they structure the material and symbolic order of the Americas generally while also providing particular sites for the liberatory prefiguration of alternative modes of collective life.