Rhythmic Literacy: Poetry, Reading and Public Voices in Black Atlantic Poetics" analyzes the poetry of the African American Langston Hughes and the Jamaican Louise Bennett during the 1940s. Through an examination of the unique similarities of their poetic projects, namely their engagement of performance to build their audiences, their experiments with poetic personae to represent vernacular social voices, their doubleness as national and transnational figures, their circulation of poetry in radio and print journalism and their use of poetry as pedagogy to promote reading, this dissertation establishes a new perspective on the role of poetry in decolonizing language practices. While Hughes and Bennett are often celebrated for their representation of oral language and folk culture, this project reframes these critical discussions by drawing attention to how they engage performance to foster an embodied form of reading that draws on Creole knowledge systems, which I term rhythmic literacy. Growing up in the U.S and Jamaica in the early twentieth century, Hughes and Bennett were both subjected to a similar Anglophone transatlantic schoolroom poetry tradition, which they contend with as one of their only available poetic models. I argue that memorization and recitation practices play a formative role in the development of their poetic projects. As an enactment and metaphor for the dynamics of colonial control, this form of mimicry demonstrates to them the power of embodied performance to reclaim language from dominant forces. This dissertation reveals how black Atlantic poetics refashions the institutional uses of poetry in early twentieth-century U.S and British colonial education for the purposes of decolonization. / English
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TEMPLE/oai:scholarshare.temple.edu:20.500.12613/2002 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Neigh, Janet Marina |
| Contributors | DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, Gauch, Suzanne, 1965-, Osman, Jena, Neptune, Harvey R., 1970-, Ramazani, Jahan, 1960- |
| Publisher | Temple University. Libraries |
| Source Sets | Temple University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation, Text |
| Format | 205 pages |
| Rights | IN COPYRIGHT- This Rights Statement can be used for an Item that is in copyright. Using this statement implies that the organization making this Item available has determined that the Item is in copyright and either is the rights-holder, has obtained permission from the rights-holder(s) to make their Work(s) available, or makes the Item available under an exception or limitation to copyright (including Fair Use) that entitles it to make the Item available., http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Relation | http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/1984, Theses and Dissertations |
Page generated in 0.0023 seconds