2021 Presidential Plenary: Poetics of Persistence in Black Life

During this session, held virtually at the 2021 MLA Annual Convention, Claudia Rankine, Fred Moten, M. Nourbese Philip, and Evie Shockley address creatively and critically the role played by Black poetry and poetics in the persistence of Black life. Against a backdrop of anti-Black racism, what aesthetic strategies and communities are possible without co-optation and effacement? How do the stories that African Americans and other diasporic Africans tell themselves about the imperative to forgive, for instance, block the way toward more radical institutional change? Is the task not merely to persist but to exist, insist, and resist? Perhaps what persists is a return to the matter of identity as poets throughout the tradition of Black poetics have used aesthetics to anticipate, counter, or simply bypass the shifting terms of anti-Black racism over the last hundred years. What account can be given of how and when Black poetics works politically, the obstructions it survives, its force, history, and promise?