Description:

This symposium includes papers by scholars working with the print culture archives of multiethnic poetry and the nationalist and anti-colonial social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. For strongly motivated historical reasons, most scholarship in this area tends to be siloed within US literary studies of minority field formations (i.e. African American or Latino studies) or else informed by aesthetic theories that bracket questions of race altogether. Beyond the US, scholarship tends to be organized around national literary histories, even though many aesthetic-political movements were transnational or diasporic in scope. By contrast, this symposium presents a series of conversations that foreground both the affinities and antagonisms among African American, Native American, Asian American, Anglo-American, and Latina/o literary and social formations at the high-water marks of neo-avant garde poetics and cultural nationalisms (circa 1965-1975), and their global networks of affinity, correspondence, solidarity and translation. The papers theorize poetry in relation to nationalism, comparative projects working across ethnic, linguistic, and national field boundaries, and papers that explore how archival practices produce and constrain poetry scholarship and pedagogy.