Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature
- The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Histories of the Present
- Part II African American Genres
- 4 Afrofuturism and the Speculative Turn
- 5 The Black Lyric
- 6 Neo-Slave Imaginaries
- 7 Incarceration and Confinement Literature
- 8 Satire, Comedy, and Critique
- 9 Popular Romance and Literary Undergrounds
- Part III Mapping New Identities and Geographies
- Part IV Critical Approaches
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
5 - The Black Lyric
from Part II - African American Genres
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 December 2023
- The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature
- The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Histories of the Present
- Part II African American Genres
- 4 Afrofuturism and the Speculative Turn
- 5 The Black Lyric
- 6 Neo-Slave Imaginaries
- 7 Incarceration and Confinement Literature
- 8 Satire, Comedy, and Critique
- 9 Popular Romance and Literary Undergrounds
- Part III Mapping New Identities and Geographies
- Part IV Critical Approaches
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
The modern lyric, emerging in the late eighteenth century, is the genre par excellence of the private individual alone with their thoughts. The construction of material and psychic interiority for the normative bourgeois subject has relied on the violent dispossession of Black people through slavery, colonialism, and other forms of exploitation. This chapter first considers the possibilities of re-marking the lyric as Black – reading the claims of Theodor Adorno’s account of lyric’s social character through a history he does not consider – before turning to contemporary questions regarding the emergence of the lyric as the preeminent genre of African American poetry since the 1980s.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023