The poetry of T. S. Eliot is a paradigmatic case of Achille Mbembe’s observation that “the western archive . . . contains within itself the resources of its own refutation.” For much of the twentieth century, the literary academy rested its conservative canon on the Eliotic formulation of tradition, but since the 1980’s, resistance to this establishment has also led to discoveries about subversive counter-currents in Eliot’s poetry, such as gender ambiguities (Gish, Laity, and Pondrom) and the influence of popular culture (Chinitz, Faulk) and minstrelsy (North, Gill). The publication of his “Bolo” verses revealed a juvenile mindset amused by gender and racial caricature (McIntire). But what evidence do we have of Eliot’s mature consciousness about the racialized caste system of his native land and the inequities and sacrifices demanded by this system? What possibilities for his own self-refutation does the paradigmatically conservative Eliot offer us? Our panel examines three possibilities for decolonizing Eliot through the resources within his poetry: identifying the colonial aspect of The Waste Land’s editing, re-imagining the poem’s speaker as racially passing, and considering the devaluation of Black lives in Jim Crow St. Louis in relation to Eliot’s preoccupation with sin and guilt. At the convergence of the centennial of The Waste Land and the decolonization movement, our panel challenges critical clichés about Eliot by probing the complicity, feelings of guilt, and mixed allegiances of the racial consciousness his poems express.

In “The Voiced and Unvoiced: The Colonial Project of The Waste Land,” Cave Canem poet Keith S. Wilson presents the case for Eliot’s self-dismantling within his signature poem. Observing that in modernism, the old is made "new" through the use of non-European traditions as spoken by European speakers, such as Imagism from haiku and Cubism from West African art, Wilson asks to what extent the originality of The Waste Land derives from its avoidance of a singular voice speaking with the authority of European tradition. The multiple speakers of the poem may be regarded either as subalterns resisting colonial assimilation, or, in view of the editing process that eliminated further voices inconsistent with Eliot’s final vision, as the finished product of colonial control. Is The Waste Land an imperial project that calls for its own abolition--and if so, what happens in its wake?

Taking up Wilson’s questions about the speaker of this poem, Michelle Taylor considers how Eliot’s seemingly authoritative voice changes if we imagine the speaker as Black. Drawing on the drafts of The Waste Land, and especially on recycled material that was eventually cut, Taylor reads The Waste Land as the culmination of Eliot’s attempts to tame his poetic racially unruly or ambiguous voice into passing. Building on North’s explication of the racial anxiety, ambiguity, and mimicry that pervades his poems, Rainey’s analysis of the poem’s institution-formation, and Kamran Javadizadeh’s thinking on “the whiteness of the lyric subject,” Taylor suggests that The Waste Land imagines as already established the paradigm of lyric whiteness that it is often accused of inaugurating: it anticipates and acquiesces to a version of lyricality in which being impersonal means passing as white.

Finally, Frances Dickey examines Eliot’s racial consciousness in the context of his roots in a city with the largest Black population west of the Mississippi. While Black Lives Matter and the Covid-19 pandemic have reminded us that premature death remains one of the most lethal aspects of American racism, the disregard for Black lives was even more visible and devastating in the predominantly Black neighborhood near T. S. Eliot’s home in St. Louis, memorably named “Death Valley.” Probing Eliot’s associations between death and guilt in this context, Dickey explores the meaning of a shocking moment in The Dry Salvages, when the poet recalls or imagines a “cargo of dead negroes” among other items carried by the flooding Mississippi River. Perhaps stored as a horrifying childhood memory from the Missouri River flood of 1902, this apparently callous reference punctuates Eliot’s reflections on “the agony of others,” disrupting the flow of his poem with its unassimilable, appalling knowledge of his city’s indifference to Black life. Responding unforgivingly to his own prayer in Ash-Wednesday, “Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness,” the figure of the Black corpse causes us to ask how much of Eliot’s preoccupation with sin—his own, and ours—may be traced to his uncomfortable consciousness of the moral compromise on which the prosperities of his family, city, and nation were built.