This session will present innovative research by young scholars on the modes of address, aesthetic productions, and representations of personhood that comprise both racial subjectivity and lyric poetry. The principal goal of this panel is to offer a new set of critical heuristics for reflecting on the multiplicity of identities that challenge the traditional attributes of the “lyric subject,” long perceived to be white, male, and solitary. Recent debates ignited by the New Lyric Studies have made important headway in theorizing what the lyric voice has in common with other discourses on democratic sociality, yet questions related to race are consistently pushed to the sidelines. As Dorothy Wang notes with warranted exasperation in a recent essay, the nearly 700-page authoritative anthology The Lyric Theory Reader (2014) contains no contributions by US ethnic minorities or discussions of issues concerning race. As this glaring critical oversight attests, scholars of contemporary poetics must answer the call to historicize and recontextualize conventional lyricism to account for intersecting forces of race, culture, and politics.

This panel draws inspiration from a rich, emerging scholarly conversation on the mutually constitutive relationship between racial subjectivity and lyric theory, exemplified by Dorothy Wang’s Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (2013), Anthony Reed’s Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (2016), and Sonya Posmentier’s Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature (2017). These studies share a commitment to uncovering the critical role that poets of color play in transforming, adapting, and revising the Western lyric tradition.

To allow for a capacious exploration of diverse historical and theoretical perspectives, I have selected four panelists who will be limited to 14-minute presentations. Isabela Fraga will begin by establishing an early historical precedent to today’s debates over race and lyric theory. Her paper focuses on the enslaved Cuban poet Juan Francisco Manzano (1797-1854), primarily known as the author of the only slave narrative produced in the Hispanic world. Fraga examines two of Manzano’s lyric poems that depict the institution of slavery, arguing that Manzano mobilizes the trope of love as bondage within the context of chattel slavery and produces a subject that does not fit the Enlightened modernity articulated by his white Creole interlocutors.

Asa Chen Zhang builds off this historical overview by examining the Japonisme-themed verses of early-twentieth-century American poets such as Hilda Conkling, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and Adelaide Crapsey. Zhang identifies a “mimetic” mode of lyric subjectivity whose expressivist incapacity enables political-aesthetic orientalist visions that are plastic, non-orientable, and cognizant of modern turmoil. Analyzing a range of verses invested in racialized imaginations, Zhang traces the protean ways that these poetesses fabricate precarious subjectivities in relation to the orientalized Otherness that emerges from transpacific encounters in the wake of Japan’s forced reopening to the West.

Examining more recent case studies, Saraswati Majumdar contributes a comparative perspective by exploring how Sophia Naz and Natasha Trethewey rework received structures like the ghazal and Blues into new forms that are affective, embodied, subversive, and ultimately affirmative. Theorizing “improvisationality” as a mode of poetic craft that undoes Eurocentric notions of subject/object, mind/body, and text/sound, Majumdar argues that reading Naz and Trethewey as improvisational helps us make several interventions into racialized conceptions of lyric subjectivity and disrupt the boundaries of categories such as vernacular, postcolonial, and Western.

Finally, Bethany Swann offers a new conceptual framework for racialized lyric subjectivity by inventing the term “lyric torque” in order to put psychoanalytic concepts of racial dissociation into conversation with the formal structures of contemporary poetry and poetics. Proposing that the spatial movement of racial dissociation mirrors the spatial movement of lyric address, Swann argues that the framework of lyric torque lends fresh insight to the way lyric structures make vivid the difficulties and possibilities of racial dissociation, as evinced in the works of contemporary Asian American poets such as Don Mee Choi, Arthur Sze, and Divya Victor.

Moving across Latin America, Transpacific diasporas, and numerous US localities, these papers demonstrate the impressive range of poetic techniques cultivated by racialized, subaltern subjects who have found themselves at odds with traditional lyric conventions. Through unique historical lenses and theoretical approaches, each explores different modes of racialized subjectivity that erode the assumption invented by Romanticism and taken up by twentieth-century critics that the lyric is a transcendental genre that gives pure expression to one’s interiority. Together, this panel shifts our collective understanding of the lyric to account for a more diverse range of perspectives on its relation to the social.