In reading the materials for this week I found my recent research of post-identity to be relevant to the discussions we will have in class this week about hybrid poetry and the diversity of black identity in poetry. I have been looking through the archives of the now out-of-print journal Post Identity and have found it helpful in my own research but also in delving into Laura and Angela’s topics.
Post Identity is a journal that published nine issues between the years of 1997 and 2007 and was edited by Nicholas Rombes and Rosemary Weatherston as a response to their unction that the “culture has become so fragmented…so as not to allow for consensus about individual or community notions of identity.” They saw a gap in the world of literary journals they sought to fill. This theme is one that was prevalent in all the readings for today.
In his introduction, Cole Swenson points to “internationalism and multiculturalism [for] broadening the aesthetic field, dispersing critical attention, and decentralizing power. Though the first word in our anthology’s title is ‘American’ it’s increasingly difficult to say just what ‘American’ in American poetry is” (xxv). In a similar vein, both Paula Rabinowitz and Ryan Cull are asking questions in the same vein about black identity. Rabinowitz points back to post-war America and quotes Richard Wright’s Native Son as a source for his questions about the material matter of black lives. Wright writes, “you usually take us for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem” (68). In his inspection of Thylias Moss, Cull points to her becoming “increasingly wary of wielding identity categories in order to seek recognition of difference since such a stratagem risks reinforcing ontological norms” (125). As seen in these readings, the question of identity is prevalent in contemporary poetry which operates in the world of posts.
In their introduction to the first issue of Post Identity titled “Otherwise: An Editorial Welcome” Rombes, Howard, and Hugh Culik begin by pointing to a 1997 task force, which opposed the idea of replacing the “other” with “multiracial” on government forms because identities are “contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in ‘essential’ unity” Rombes et al go on to note that identity also consists of many other categories like “gender, sex, human, cyborg, nation, class, region, and religion.” The elimination of public otherness, they say means that “difference is everywhere and, thus, nowhere,” an idea that was already becoming prevalent in media moves being made.
They point to new technologies as a means that further blur the lines of identity. Technology is a new teacher, they say that causes “accidental leaning” and blends “high” and “low” culture within clicks of each other. The inclusion of pop, or Avant-Pop as art to be critiqued, and the ability for pseudo-scholars to mingle with scholars online all create the “deafening feedback reverberating back on a generation wanting to understand the horror and beauty of anarchic noise. A recursive feedback-loop; noise made from noise; a representation of a representation.”
This idea of the high and low brought together is where they land as the driving force of post-identity. The image they leave us with is that of Nixon and Elvis shaking hands at the White House, both furthering their own, separate agendas. Nixon to fight against the drug culture, and Presley to regain fame after his escapades. Rombes et al summarize post-identity as “the disappearance of distinction. The high and low, brought together strangely under the official gaze. Elvis and Nixon, meaningless and full of import, staged for the camera in the land of the lost.”
A question I’m considering in these thoughts on post-identity and this week’s topics is how post-identity differs, or whether it does, from one group to the next. How is post-identity for black people different from that of Asians Americans?
Rombes definition of post-identity is one that I want to push against. As you said, he defines post-identity as “the disappearance of distinction,” but I think that our generation and some of the work of these poets points more to a reemerging plethora of distinction. There’s a strange juxtaposition within many of our poems for tonight. On one hand, the poets shout and cry for us to recognize their differences, to note how dissimilar they are from each other as we’ve categorized them. They call for audiences to recognize the impossibility of categorizing the speakers of these poems by specific qualities like race and gender, class and education. On the other hand, the poets, especially of the Black Lives Matter movement, call for a unifying of people, for everyone to become both tolerant and accepted.
I’m not sure I can fully answer your question for how post-identity works in Asian American poetics, but for black poets, post-identity is just one part of what they are trying to accomplish, but it’s not used in the sense Rombes defines it. I think their aim is the exact opposite. They don’t call for a disappearance of distinction; that’s something I think they are accusing others of trying to do to them, just another form of oppression to make them all the same.
I remember the poem we read for last week where the speaker talked about all the different ethnicities in the community, the different store fronts and kids playing in the streets, the one with “Japs against Japs.” That poem in particular seems not to call for the disappearance of distinction, but for the celebration, or at least, the acknowledgment of distinctions.
I found so much to think about in the readings for this week in relation to the questions that you raise, Charlotte. I agree with Angela that it is about a plurality of distinction that seems to be at play–distinctions that might not always neatly align with a singular identity. I’m thinking particularly here of Moss–the poems in the article rather than the poems Angela selected for us to read. A multiplicity of distinctions brings us into contact with allegiances and commonalities that a singular identity might refuse (as the too-constraining personal that the Black Arts movement demanded of her demonstrates). Moss’s work seemed closer to the hybrid work we read that seemed obsessed with permeable boundaries in this sense, though rarely in a racialized sense.
I’m reminded of Eliot’s line about impersonality: you have to have a personality in order to know you you might escape it. Post-identity works in a similar way: you can never leave behind the bindings of identity. They come with you into the beyond, informing and inflecting all that later work and life.
I think your question about post-identity in different contexts is an important one. It seems as relevant within any given poetic “group” as it is between them. There are many competing ideas about this related to which aspects of identity seem to be diminished and in need of supporting via critique or celebration, and to what extent poetry is uniquely situated to perform that critique or celebration.