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Notes Introduction 1. Part of the language poetry school, Hunt engages a decidedly different generic template, that of a late twentieth-century, white-identified school of poetics which eschews direct reference to identity or even concrete, accessible subjects for experiments with the abstraction of language. Hunt and a growing handful of critics have taken on experimental poetics as a means of reordering race and gender as categories that shape and are shaped by language itself, as is discussed later in the introduction. See also Cummings (2005) on Hunt, aesthetics, and race. This discussion of a “New Black Aesthetic” (usually referring to fiction and music) is also infamously taken up by novelist Trey Ellis in his piece of the same name (1989), which attempts to open up space for black popular and literary culture to navigate outside of expected content and form (see also Lott 1989; Favor 1993). 2. For example, see condemnations of Phillis Wheatley in the Black Arts era by Amiri Baraka in Blues People ([1963] 2002), among others, or the invisibility of formally innovative black poets’ work to black audiences if it does not directly reference race, such as Harryette Mullen’s second and third collections of poetry, before Muse & Drudge. See Mix (2005), Frost (1995). 3. This move mirrors Foucault’s take in The Order of Things itself, which is also the title of a Lucretius verse (“On the Order of Things,” also translated as “On the Nature of Things,” 50 BC) that focuses on the materiality of the natural world (which Foucault brings back to a structuralist critique of form, in his way). See also Jonathan Goldberg’s The Seeds of Things (2009), which takes off on both Lucretius and Foucault in rethinking the materiality of the body and sexuality in Western history. While I do not claim to be a materialist, I do want to think of studying the text as a more materialist endeavor than aesthetic theory might suggest, something that gets to the texture of difference, continuity, and the experience of diaspora through the innovative rendering of language, genre, and form. 210 / notes 4. Jacques Rancière makes the argument that aesthetics “can be understood . . . as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. . . . Artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility” (2006, 13). 5. As scholars such as Farah Jasmine Griffin (1995) have also done. 6. As Carrie Noland and Barrett Watten argue in the introduction to their 2009 edited collection, “‘Avant-garde’ and ‘diaspora,’ then both lend themselves to conceptual as well as historical categories. In their adjectival forms, ‘avant-garde’ and ‘diasporic ’ characterize moments belonging to a wide range of cultural trajectories (types of displacement imposed by oppressive force) and cultural logic (ways of understanding the relation between artistic practice and these forces)” (2). 7. In African American studies, Claudia Tate (1998) refers to this textual phenomenon as “racial protocol” and relates it not just to realism but to models of “protest.” Ann duCille articulates this in what she terms the “bourgeois blues” (1993a, 421), which remains skeptical of “the utopian trend in contemporary cultural criticism that readily reads resistance in such privileged, so-called authentically black discourses as the classic blues of the nineteen-twenties, while denigrating other cultural forms for their perceived adherence to and promotion of traditional (white) values” (421). She continues: “Middle-class, when applied to black artists and their subjects, becomes a pejorative, a sign of having mortgaged one’s black aesthetic to the alien conventions of the dominant culture” (423). Similarly, form and genre have not always taken center stage in negotiating transnational feminist studies, where an emphasis on realism, however informed by Mohanty’s blistering critique of Third World women’s representation (1984), has stood as the quotidian methodology of reading across axes of power. This difficulty in recognizing what’s “black” or “feminist” enough for anthologies , courses, and the canon has displaced many contemporary women writers’ work but has also given rise to counterdiscourses and narratives which trouble the lines between authenticity and racial categories, as well as race and poetic form, in African American and...

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