Toward a Decolonial Lyric Studies

In her first scholarly monograph, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature, Sonya Posmentier theorizes "lyric ecology" in black diasporic literature and music from the early twentieth century to the present. I read Cultivation and Catastrophe's intervention as threefold. First, the book posits an expanded definition for what types of texts might be read as lyric while also accounting for how black diasporic writing and music have shaped contemporary conceptions of the term (lyric). Thus, the book broadens the scope of the new lyric studies, an area of inquiry that has focused primarily on written texts by canonical white poets. Second, Cultivation and Catastrophe models a transnational approach to the study of black literature that moves between works by American and Caribbean authors. In Posmentier's own words, the book does so in order to "bring into focus a dynamic, cross-cultural, extranational zone defined by the shared processes of growth and destruction" (5). Posmentier's words point toward a third contribution: Cultivation and Catastrophe develops a conception of ecopoetics—an emerging area of both creative practice and theoretical inquiry—that requires a postcolonial or decolonial reading method. In the book, Posmentier applies a postcolonial lens as opposed to an explicitly decolonial one. But by charting how black writers and musical artists have employed lyric modes to respond to environmental experiences of spatiotemporal rupture and displacement, she upholds decolonial theory's commitment to exposing the structural workings of colonial power.¹ Through her readings, Posmentier reveals how what we call natural disasters are often manmade disasters, or environmental events whose devastating effects on human populations are exacerbated by human systems of control that oppress or destroy racialized peoples and reproduce white dominance.

Posmentier draws on theories such as Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant's that conceive of Caribbean history and time as marked by rupture and of identity and belonging as shaped more by shared environmental experience than national borders. Broadly, Posmentier argues that lyric—a term she understands capaciously as encompassing aspects of poetry, prose writing, and music—lends form to environmental catastrophes (including slavery) that have violently shaped black diasporic consciousness. She grounds her claims in analyses of writings and music by a range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers and artists. Posmentier's readings are founded on research into the production and circulation histories of these texts, as well as archival research about the authors' and artists' influences and interlocutors.

Part 1 of Cultivation and Catastrophe examines the poetry of "plantation geograph[ies]" and how the "language of cultivation" produces "diasporic subjectivit[y]" (20). In chapter 1, Posmentier reads Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay's sonnets as metaphoric "provision ground[s]," plots of land on the edges of Jamaican plantations given to slaves for growing their own food. Posmentier shows how McKay moves between standard English and dialect, treating the poem itself as a provision ground suffused by slavery's history, but also as a site of creative possibility. Posmentier situates McKay's poetry in a transnational context. She tracks the influence of rural Jamaica, McKay's birthplace, on his poetry and cites personal letters and circulation histories to show his long identification with Jamaica. On Posmentier's reading, McKay's use of the sonnet registers the tension between bondage and freedom in both colonial environments and colonial poetic forms.

By reading McKay's sonnets in the context of the black Atlantic and as influenced by plantation geographies, Posmentier models possibilities for what we might call transnational lyric reading. "Lyric reading," Virginia Jackson's phrase, refers to the reading of poems aslyric. As Jackson puts it, "to be lyric is to be read as lyric."² Transnational lyric reading, for Posmentier, would seem to be a mode of reading that considers how a range of cultural and environmental influences that transgress national borders inform a poet's practice.

In chapter 2, Posmentier reads midcentury Caribbean periodicals, too, as experimental provision grounds that...