Memory and Kinship
1. How do Anglophone writers engage with the harrowing events in history such as the Middle Passage and their continuous impact?
2. How do contemporary literature and arts refigure the past, the present and the future, inspiring different kinds of futures?
3. How do new readings/readers approach the representations and imagining of the ocean and kinship differently?
Sample Solution
In 2008, in a single issue of American Poet, the biannual journal of the Academy of American Poets, two unrelated essays made the same claim – namely, that there has been noteworthy trend in American poetry toward the historical poem. That both essay writers, Major Jackson and Natasha Trethewey, are African American is more than a coincidence, and we should not be surprised to find both essays citing a healthy number of African American poets as examples (and forerunners) of this trend. Jackson pointedly acknowledges the political work that poets of color and immigrant poets have performed in writing poems about our histories – broadly speaking, the work of complicating and filing in the “official record.”
