Race and Time: American Women's Poetics from Antislavery to Racial Modernity

8. Critical Positions in Racial Modernity: An Approach to Teaching

Recuperative scholarship presents forgotten texts in an accessible venue and introduces them into current critical discourse, opening the way for teaching and learning communities to engage freshly with moments of genre development and angles and objects of critique. Sarah Piatt ’s “A Child’s Party (in Kentucky, A.D. 185_),” Frances Harper’s “The Deliverance ,” and Mary Lambert’s Loew’s Bridge complicate our picture of the development of women’s poetics, modeling variant adjustments in poetry’s relationship to the changing structure of social power. Recuperative projects , however, are always both diachronic and synchronic. The search for marginalized histories begins with present concerns, with the recognition of present needs for a past different from the one made available to us by dominant cultural narratives; at the same time, resistance to the legitimation of marginalized histories is deeply embedded in present stakes. Because poems are critical texts, they not only offer ways for us to reenvision cultural moments of the past; they can also act as catalysts for exercising and extending our own range of critical viewpoints. This chapter began as a scattered set of intentions: to conclude the postbellum section of this book, to describe how each poem inflects modernity through race, to push beyond isolated readings of the text by reading them through one another, to discover not only what they tell us about their historical moment but also what they offer about how we read that moment and our own. My intentions were thus ultimately pedagogical, and in the chapter as it stands, I first offer my own discoveries, then suggest an approach to teaching these texts that, I hope, centralizes the potential of recuperative scholarship. In my readings, the three postbellum poems represent three distinct frameworks of expression and value—art, activism, and cultural criticism —with which we commonly engage in education in the humanities; I trace Critical Positions in Racial Modernity An Approach to Teaching 8 how the meanings and values that sustain each of these frameworks contest with and supplement one another. I began putting these poems into dialogue by reading Piatt and Harper through Lambert because, in capturing a moment in the growth of corporate capitalism, expertise, and the city, she comes closest of the three to representing the international and cosmopolitan face of modernity.1 Lambert’s view of modernity is thus the most recognizable within the canons of cultural criticism, and her framing of the postbellum the most familiar in American cultural history. The world these poems share is a composite of the reconstructed past and the envisioned future, existing in the aftermath of a historical trauma of which we are all still survivors. A massive horror has occurred. As long as the horror remains in “history,” people think of it as having been left behind. Few attend to how it still shapes the present, yet injustices persist, and the horror has left gaps in the current arrangement of things. The categories of identity through which the horror raged have been dismantled in such a way that, among the liberally educated, their legacies are little more than bureaucratic details. For such a world, the subject of Loew’s Bridge, a hodgepodge critic of presentness, is the legitimate spokesperson. Still, there are resisters: artists who (like Piatt) form fragile riddles out of a blend of mourning and guilt over the lost enjoyment of difference, and activists who (like Harper) insist that those categories must be renaturalized for the sake of justice. Read as a resistant text, “A Child’s Party” shows the aesthetic’s capacity for exposing the assumptions that the cultural critic protects from examination as the base of its self-authorization. In the case of Loew’s Bridge, those assumptions are the purity of the domestic past and the marginal relevance of racial difference. The cost to the aesthetic of the insights it makes available is distance from the critic’s wider world of exchange and power; yet the aesthetic bears traces of the marketplace. If we read Piatt’s and Lambert ’s poems side by side, thinking of “A Child’s Party” as an account of the childhood formation of one of Lambert’s “airy fairy figures slight” (the fashionable women of the city), Piatt’s poem marks changes that occurred as women’s public culture adapted to the growth of commercial capitalism. The female role complementary to the masculinist striving that Lambert witnessed was consumption; women’s print culture bent toward consumerism , and the white female body...