Towards Post-Blackness: A Critical Study of Rita Dove's Poetry(543 Counterpoints)

The book is a detailed introduction to Post-Blackness as a literary aesthetic, tracing its emergence to the philosophical movement that defined itself in the visual arts towards the end of the twentieth century. Aiming to redefine African American identity in a postethnic era, it highlights the gaps in the metanarrative of history through a reformulation of visual images in the memory as signifiers with their related associations to historical trauma. Stating that the reformulation of identity needs a decentering of race, the study follows Rita Dove as she traces the path to this reformulation in her volumes of poetry to initiate a Hegelian progression towards a post-racial freedom to expand contours to redefine Blackness. Pointing out that poetry is perhaps the best vehicle to initiate this transition of the philosophy from the visual arts to the sphere of the literary, the book follows Dove’s reformulation of race as a spatio-temporal domain of existence, and language as lived space. Isolating signifiers to reformulate their associations with sites of historical trauma in the memory, Roy traces how Dove deconstructs history, myth, and music to arrive at a moment that is both post-racial and post-historical. This book can be useful to students of African American literature at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as well as to doctoral scholars working on race studies and contemporary African American literature.

Table of Contents:
Foreword – Acknowledgments – Introduction – Transcultural Space in The Yellow House on the Corner and Museum – History and Historicity in Thomas and Beulah and On the Bus with Rosa Parks – Deconstructing Myths in Grace Notes and Mother Love – Redefining Black Aesthetics in American Smooth and Sonata Mulattica – Jouissance: The Philosopher’s Playlist for the Apocalypse – Conclusion – Index.

About the Author :
Lekha Roy is an academic, writer, and critic based in India. She received her Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, and has published several articles on race, trauma, and power relations. Her work focuses on the role of language and images in the dynamics of identity formation, with special emphasis on changing contours of the personal and the political. Lekha Roy can be reached at lekharoy91@gmail.com.

Review :
Towards Post-Blackness: A Critical Study of Rita Dove’s Poetry is a much-needed revisiting of Black aesthetics in the twenty-first century. I believe that this study on Post-Blackness and on Rita Dove as a Post-Black poet will be of great use to scholars of African-American literature and race studies. I would definitely recommend it as a valuable addition to the body of critical work available on the subject. —Dr. Ishrat Bashir, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Central University of Kashmir, Ganderbal, Kashmir Author of The Naked Truth and Other Stories Towards Post-Blackness is a valuable book that reinterprets the sensibility of a significant living Black American poet, Rita Dove, from a universal point of view. Any good poet must speak to readers everywhere; they cannot be pigeonholed to a particular place, race or identity as they transcend all identity barriers to speak to the human race. Lekha Roy argues this point in her book by approaching Dove’s poetry from the Hegelian view of the relationship between self and other. I recommend the book to scholars of American poetry, world literature and minority literature in South Asia and beyond. —Prof. Mohammad A. Quayum, Professor, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia Author of Saul Bellow and American Transcendentalism (Twentieth Century American-Jewish Writers) Towards Post-Blackness: A Critical Study of Rita Dove’s Poetry is a major contribution to literary-cultural studies on the philosophy of race. In interpreting the poet’s creative and liberative journey towards self-knowledge in Hegelian terms, Roy reignites the ontological questions that permeate concepts of race, identity, and the role of language in defining ideas of the Self and the Other. This book bridges the gap between poetry and visual art to define Post-Blackness as a philosophy of life for a people straining to break away from the labels that define them. —Prof. Bijoy H. Boruah, Visiting Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Jammu, India Author of Fiction and Emotion: A Study in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Mind