This session will illustrate how “Personism,” as defined by the American poet Frank O’Hara, yields the ability to elucidate and redress narratives of oppression within literary texts. Personism is described in The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara (1974) as the dynamic configuration experienced between two people engaging in conversation (XIV). Frank O'Hara likens this interaction to a telephone call between two people, crafting an intimate space of great immensity. This panel traces how queer and non-white communities contest systems of oppression and embody a sense of agency in their works by crafting intimate spaces between the author and reader.

This session examines how Personism facilitates a sense of intimacy that proffers new interpretations of personhood, resistance, and belonging for queer and racialized communities. Utilizing Personism as an analytical framework for poetry and prose reveals how oppressed peoples contested the violence, and archival silences reproduce in their erasure of subaltern narratives. Overall, the panel will use the framework of Personism to launch an investigation into the past, present, and potential production of literary texts. The panelists will use the combination of poststructuralist theory, historical methods, and close reading to account for the text’s materiality and its affective implications. This approach is inherently reflexive and creates the unique opportunity to interact with these texts in motion while respecting their historicity and initial momentum of expression. To do this is like talking on the telephone, placed squarely between people instead of pages, creating a conversational rhizomorphic space that doesn’t impose a limiting structure on the object of study.

The conceptual roots of this paper draw from the theoretical frameworks established by Gilles Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995). These texts establish the historical and literary analytical frameworks that will denote how Personism presents the opportunity for new potentialities of embodiment and the correction of oppressive historical narratives.

Andrea Morales Loucil will begin this session by examining how Cuban and Puerto Rican revolutionaries of African descent used poetry to propel their independence movements during the nineteenth-century. Namely, poems by the Puerto Rican mixed-race poet Francisco Gonzalo “Pachín” Marín from his book En la Arena (1898) illustrate how rhizomatic resistance networks emerged throughout the Caribbean and the United States. Points of convergence in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and New York City facilitated rhizomatic interactions between revolutionaries of African descent. These interactions developed a literary sphere where revolutionaries used prose and poetry to advocate for liberation. This paper contends that Francisco Gonzalo Marín’s poetry embodies a sense of Personism between himself and his audience, fostering the creation of Afro-diasporic bonds of resistance in the pursuit of independence. Marín's constant displacement throughout the Caribbean further illustrates how movement and poetry united people of African descent across national lines in the fight for collective freedom.

Conner Moore will illustrate how Algernon Charles Swinburn’s Poems and Ballads (1866) and Lesbia Brandon (1952) represent queer and gender nonconforming people through an objectifying, heteronormative lens. Moore consequently argues for an intuitive and undertheorized manner of reading Swinburne’s works which would recognize and allow for the possibility that Swinburne’s representations of gender nonconformity, intersexuality, and trans femininity might be read more straightforwardly as sincere explorations and fantasies of materially transitioning to and occupying a feminine embodiment. The twofold purpose of this essay is to examine and critique the initial scholarly conversation around Swinburne’s representations of these queer figures. Trans readings of his works demonstrate unacknowledged dimensions of his writings and gesture toward a component of his thinking that merits further consideration in literary criticism of his career as well as biographical discussions of the author.

Vanessa West will conclude this panel by positing how occurrences in which Frank O’Hara addresses his relationship with gender espouse an affinity for the transfeminine. Further, she expounds upon how these embodiments are interpreted in an arborescent manner. West cites “Having a Coke with You is Even More Fun than Ideology Critique” by Brian Glavey to showcase how heteronormative contexts misplace O’Hara’s representations and subsequently reinforce the static confines of his historical identity through intentional silences. Thus, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s conceptualization of historical production in Silencing the Past will tease out the silences in O’Hara’s poetics that showcase his embodiment of a transfeminine identity. Exploring these silences to portray O’Hara’s vulnerability and embodiment of a feminine identity constellates the myriad of possibilities Personism proffers in an intimate conversation.