Diasporic Avant-Gardes Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement [Paperback]

Diasporic Avant-Gardes draws into dialogue two differing traditions of poetic practice: the diasporic and the avant-garde. This interdisciplinary collection examines the unacknowledged affinities (and crucial differences) between avant-garde and diasporic formal strategies and social formations. The essays foreground the creation of experimental forms and investigate the specific contexts of cultural displacement and language use that inform their poetics.Introduction; C.Noland & B.Watten Aim? C?saire and the Syntax of Influence; B.Edwards Alan Sondheim's Internet Diaspora; M.Damon Remediation and Diaspora: Kamau Brathwaite's Video-Style; C.Noland Re-opening a Poetics of Re-openings (a.k.a. 'Naked Strategic Partners'); R.Toscano On the Outskirts of Form: Cosmopoetics in the Shadow of NAFTA; M.Davidson Franco Luambo Makiadi's Universalism and Avant-Garde Particularity; B.Watten ah noh musik dat: Speech in the Discourse of Nationalism; M.McMorris On the Nomadic Circulation of Contemporary Poetics Between Europe, North America, and the Maghreb; P.Joris Diaspora and the Avant-Garde in Contemporary Black British Poetry; L.Ramey Something Nation: Radical Spaces of Performance in Linton Kwesi Johnson and Cris Cheek; C.Harryman From Spanglish to Glossolalia: Edwin Torres's Nuyo-Futurist Utopia; U.Noel From Bass Cathedral; N.Mackey From Vaduz [Performance Poem]; B.Heidsieck

This is an important, indeed a crucial project. It will constitute a formative contribution to the discussion of an expanded field of contemporary poetics. The claim the essays make, quite properly, amounts less to a positivity than a negative solidarity that respects the radical particularity of writers and/or movements while noticing their common refusal of traditional forms and identity politics. The aim in bringing these essays together is to create dialogues across difference that expose, nonetheless, important strategic similarities among a variety of radical experimental writings. - AlS@