Date of Award
Spring 5-2-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
First Advisor
Nijah Cunningham
Second Advisor
Kelvin Black
Academic Program Adviser
Janet Neary
Abstract
My thesis investigates how a reading of Bajan poet Kamau Brathwaite’s early works can provide us with a story of his disillusionment with and subversion of the representational form of lyric subjectivity in service of a Caribbean literary tradition rooted not in coherence but in rupture. I argue that Brathwaite’s poiesis stages the disintegration of lyric’s representational schema. What emerges from its residue is a poiesis attuned to an unstable, catastrophic sociality. Reading across Brathwaite’s oeuvre in this way is a novel approach which makes comprehensible the rhetorical and theoretic decisions that led up to the creation of some of his most prominent works.
Recommended Citation
Mehta, Jahnavi, "Legacies of Caribbean Lyric: Kamau Brathwaite’s Early Works and the Instability of ‘The Lyric I’" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/1348
