Next Friday, November 19th, the American Area seminar will be virtually hosting Gillian White, Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan.
The Americanist area seminar will convene in person in 235 Decio Hall at 3:00 pm and zooming Gillian into the room. The talk is entitled, 'All the Genres a Scene Could Be': The Figure of Genre in Contemporary U.S. Poetries.
The talk weighs some very recent instances in which poets' discourses of genre become or are also suddenly conversations about racialization. What does a fascination with genre-thinking and the figure of genre in the last decade or so in the US -- attention to "hybrids," the "post-genre," going "beyond genre," and so on -- have to do with discourses of race and racialization addressed and not addressed by US poetics? And for whom? The talk finds its way through a few moments in genre theory that turn genre "recognition" into a literal space with a temporality. It ends by considering a Terrance Hayes poem, "What I Am" (1999) as a genre theory poem, to think about the implications for genre working as a figure (rather than as something to escape).