ENGLISH 131 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: English Compound, Nonperson, Enjambment
Document Summary
History & nation vs race transnational/transmedium justification. Both handle the q of what"s available to them, what their poetry can do, how it should/shouldn"t be judged. Dunbar didn"t want to just perform mimesis of dialect to please white expectations; subverted/sabotaged that from the inside out. Now we"re looking at writers ~20yrs later. Johnson"s essay teaches white people how to read what they"ll encounter after the preface. Makes what seems to be massive concessions to white expectation; but also subverts that entirely, ~trojan horse rhetoric - slips inside the racist idea of racial essentialism and destroys it. Ex: talks abt am blacks" racial gift for adaptability - intrinsic quality isn"t static but responds to environment - racist, essentialist terms, but very different idea. Categories of the human completely constructed by time in a place - opp of essentialism. Gets in the door by started out w/ concession that race is real; but everything in.
