The Northwestern Poetry and Poetics Colloquium in association with Post45 presents a symposium titled “Radical Poetics: Archives, Forms, Social Movements” at Northwestern University on April 23-24, 2015. The symposium will include a screening in the Block Cinema of rarely seen mid-1960s poetry documentaries, featuring a range of poets from Gwendolyn Brooks to Wole Soyinka, as well as a keynote reading by Victor Hernández Cruz.
The symposium will feature papers from scholars who work on print culture archives of multiethnic poetry and the nationalist and anti-colonial social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. For strongly motivated historical reasons, most scholarship in this area tends to be siloed within US literary studies of minority field formations (i.e. African American or Latino studies) or else informed by aesthetic theories that bracket questions of race altogether. Beyond the US, scholarship tends to be organized around national literary histories, even though many aesthetic-political movements were transnational or diasporic in scope. By contrast, the symposium will include conversations that foreground both the affinities and antagonisms among African American, Native American, Asian American, Anglo-American, and Latina/o literary and social formations at the high-water marks of neo-avant garde poetics and cultural nationalisms (circa 1965-1975), and their global networks of affinity, correspondence, solidarity and translation. The papers engage in theorizing poetry in relation to nationalism, expanding comparative projects working across ethnic, linguistic, and national field boundaries, and exploring how archival practices produce and constrain poetry scholarship and pedagogy. A full schedule is below.
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Thursday, April 23
6:00 pm, Block Museum of Art
Welcome reception.
7:00 pm, Block Cinema
Poetry on Public Television: the 1960s
An evening of documentary films on US and African poets, all produced for National Educational Television in the mid-1960s. Writers include Robert Duncan, John Wieners, Gwendolyn Brooks, Leopold Sédar Senghor, David Rubadiri, and a variety of concrete poets. Introduced by Harris Feinsod. For more information, visit the Block Museum Website.
Friday, April 24 — Harris Hall, Room 108
8:45am— Opening Remarks
Archives of Black and Latino Poetics
9:00am — 10:15am
Urayoán Noel (NYU), “In Search of a Nuyorican Sixties: Reading the Pedro Pietri and Jack Agüeros Archives”
Kinohi Nishikawa (Princeton), “Hoyt Fuller Between Two Archives”
Moderated by Adrienne Brown (University of Chicago)
10:15am — 11:30am
Stephen Schryer (New Brunswick, CAN), “Gwendolyn Brooks, the War on Poverty, and the Black Arts Movement”
Samantha Pinto (Georgetown), “Africa Recirculated: The Conflicting Poetics of Independence”
Moderated by Martha Biondi (Northwestern)
11:30am — 12:45pm
Anthony Reed (Yale) “Anarchic Disregard: Amiri Baraka’s Sound of Black Thought”
Harris Feinsod (Northwestern), “The Intermedial Corrido: González, Dorn, Allen”
Moderated by Geraldo Cadava (Northwestern)
12:45pm — 2:00pm Lunch Provided
Social Movements in and beyond the Nation
2:00pm — 3:15pm
Chadwick Allen (Ohio State), “Just How Radical Were Native Poetics?”
John Alba Cutler (Northwestern) “Pocho-Che and the Lost History of Chicano Movement Hemispherism”
Moderated by Ivy Wilson (Northwestern)
3:15pm — 4:30pm
Sonya Posmentier (NYU), “Minor poems: Reading Bad Verse in the West Indian Literary Archive”
Stephen Voyce (Iowa), “The Caribbean Artists Movement, UK Migrant Activism, and the Havana Congress of Third World Intellectuals”
Moderated by Shaundra Myers (Northwestern).