Between Black Subjects: Toward a Theory of Black Lyricism

Lyric, as reading and writing practice, constellates isolated moments whose cumulative texture give a feel for life as it is lived. Its claims to generalized humanity, however, put it at odds with the experiences of otherness that have defined black life. Black writing often works through and alongside texts (photographs, bureaucratic lists, legends, myths) and genres (such as the lyric), rooting itself in the gap between the predicted and desired effects of literary forms and the motivated and guilty (because motivated to find what may not be there) aspects of reading. Recasting earlier arguments about a post-lyric tendency among some contemporary black writers through substantive critiques of coloniality as offered by Frantz Fanon, Dionne Brand and Sylvia Wynter this talk offers a preliminary account of the theoretical and historical meanings of contemporary black lyric practice as an ongoing, collective project of theorizing black life.