This panel considers the way whiteness participates in the racial dynamics of contemporary American poetry. As Toni Morrison assures an interviewer, we are all "raced." But what does that mean for white writers who have written with whiteness as their background, white on white? Markers of whiteness are deeply embedded into the expectations that govern how a thing or a person should be composed, into notions of legibility. Where do white writers’ choices implicitly or explicitly reveal how the writers are raced? How do decisions about subject or process impact poets of color? Presenters will engage with specific aspects of what happens as the white subject position becomes racialized. Presenters will discuss the topic through close readings, interrogations of personal work, creative erasure, and socio-historical reviews. This includes notions of anger as held against people of color, anxiety around the term “racist” as an adjective versus a noun, and an exploration of white male poets dragging the dominant lyric into a mode of interiority at a time when minority voices were gaining authority from an expanding speaker position.
STATEMENT OF MERIT
The full context of the Toni Morrison interview shows her responding to accusations of being preoccupied by race, and to “concerns” that she only writes about black subject matters. This highlights the problem of whiteness being somehow excluded from racial configurations, or, more to the point, the problem of race being recognized topically as an explicit social or political category and not by the micro-tendencies and residual effects of structuring (literary) perception on a white and euro-centric legacies. Beyond self-announcing efforts at incorporating race into a poetic project, how can race be made visible—through affective stances, tonal contours, procedural decisions? White poets have historically seemed unconcerned with race, though their indifference does not mean that their poetry does make statements about race. Where racial aspects of white have been discounted or under-investigated, this panel seeks to make interventions.