Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2026

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Program

Liberal Studies

Advisor

Siraj Ahmed

Subject Categories

Literature in English, North America | Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority

Keywords

Poetry, African American Literature, American Poetry, Afro-Surrealism, Experimental Poetry, Politics and Aesthetics

Abstract

This study is comprised of two essays on the politics of aesthetics in postwar American black experimental poetry. Within the domain of contemporary poetry scholarship, this study serves three distinct yet interrelated purposes: 1.) to intervene within ongoing debates about the relation—or purported lack thereof—between black artistic practices and those of the historic and American avant-gardes by emphasizing the politics of aesthetics; 2.) to offer a critique of the usage of the discourses of postmodernism and of black aesthetics in the field by elucidating the historicity of their conceptual frameworks; and 3.) to provide an alternative to contemporary scholarship’s narrow preoccupation with identity-based themes and subject-matter by reprioritizing poetic form and technique as categories of historical analysis and cultural critique.

The first essay, entitled “Conspicuous Technique: Black Experimental Poetry and the Politics of Form” addresses the politics of literary form in experimental black poetry of the 1960s. Analyzing the use of collage aesthetics—a term denoting a suite of attributes conceptually inherent to and historically associated with collage artistic practice—in works by Russell Atkins, Norman Pritchard and Lorenzo Thomas, it argues that such a poetics can be understood as 1.) a tacit rebuttal, at the level of form, of the inter and intra racial strictures placed upon black artists and cultural production by the racial politics of the era; and 2.) as an alternative means of addressing the societal position of African Americans caught between the struggle for desegregation—and thus the promise of full integration into the American socio-political and economic order—and the resistance to forced assimilation of African American cultural identity and social life.

The second essay, entitled “Bob Kaufman: Between Surrealism and Afro-Surrealism” addresses the Surrealist-influenced poetry of Bob Kaufman from the perspective of the twenty first century conception of Afro-Surrealism. Reading Kaufman’s poetry against the notion of contemporary Afro-Surrealism as articulated by D. Scot Miller in his 2007 manifesto on Afro Surrealist aesthetics, it argues that despite shared commonalities the disjunction between Miller’s aesthetics and Kaufman’s poetics reveals a shift in the American discourse of race and therefore of the function of black aesthetics that is underacknowledged in accounts of contemporary Afro Surrealism.

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