Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era

299 Pages·2019·3.736 MB·English

by  Tiffany Austin, Sequoia Maner, Emily Ruth Rutter, darlene anita scott

REVISITING THE ELEGY IN THE
BLACK LIVES MATTER ERA
Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era is an edited collection of critical
essays and poetry that investigates contemporary elegy within the black diaspora.
Scores of contemporary writers have turned to elegiac poetry and prose in order
to militate against the white supremacist logic that has led to the recent deaths
of unarmed black men, women, and children. This volume combines scholarly
and creative understandings of the elegy in order to discern how mourning
feeds our political awareness in this dystopian time as writers attempt to see,
hear, and say something in relation to the bodies of the dead as well as to living
readers. Moreover, this book provides a model for how to productively interweave
theoretical and deeply personal accounts to encourage discussions about art and
activism that transgress disciplinary boundaries, as well as lines of race, gender,
class, and nation.
Tiffany Austin, PhD, was born on April 26, 1975, in Murfreesboro, Arkansas, to
the union of Anthony (Tony) Eric Austin and Ruth Ann May, who later moved to
Kansas City, Missouri, in 1977. Tiffany joined the ancestors on Saturday, June 23,
2018. During her career, Tiffany taught at Florida Memorial University, Mississippi
Valley State University, and most recently at the University of The Bahamas. She
was also a widely published poet, with her chapbook Étude appearing in 2013. Of
this volume, her mentor Sterling Plumpp noted, “Austin’s genius is her unusual
gift for metaphor and allusion.” Others recognized Tiffany’s genius too, with
her poems appearing in such prestigious outlets as Callaloo, Obsidian III, African
American Review, Coloring Book: An Anthology of Poetry and Fiction by Multicultural
Writers, Warpland, pluck!, The Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture, Valley Voices,
Auburn Avenue, TriQuarterly, Sycorax’s Daughters, and Moko: Caribbean Arts and
Letters. Tiffany was a teacher, writer, poet, activist, and feminist. Never one for
titles, she was moved instead by both action and passion. She was incomparable,
generous, artistic, and authentic—a beautiful soul who will live on in the many
artistic and personal seeds she planted and nurtured.
Sequoia Maner is a poet-scholar and Mellon Teaching Fellow of Feminist
Studies at Southwestern University. She earned her B.A. in English from Duke
University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English from the University of
Texas at Austin. She is coeditor of Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era.
Her dissertation and book project, Liberation Aesthetics in the #BlackLivesMatter
Era, examines how experimental poetics and performance bolster black social
movements. Her essay on the performance of “quiet interiority” as collective
praxis in Beyoncé’s Lemonade is published in the journal Meridians: feminism,
race, transnationalism and her poem “upon reading the autopsy of Sandra Bland,”
finalist for the 2017 Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, is published in Obsidian:
Literature & Arts of the African Diaspora.
Emily Ruth Rutter is Assistant Professor of English at Ball State University,
where she teaches courses in Multi-Ethnic American and African American
Literature. She is the author of two monographs: Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary
Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line (University Press of Mississippi,
2018) and The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry
(University of Alabama Press, 2018). Her research has been published in the
journals African American Review, South Atlantic Review, Studies in American Culture,
Aethlon, and MELUS. Her book chapter on African American women poets
appears in A Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century American Women’s Poetry, and a
book chapter on Amiri Baraka and sports is forthcoming in Some Other Blues: New
Perspectives on Amiri Baraka (Ohio State UP, 2021).
darlene anita scott is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Union University.
She is a poet and visual artist whose research explores corporeal performances of
trauma and the violence of silence. Her poetry has appeared in journals including
J Journal, Quiddity, and The Baltimore Review, among others. Her art has been
featured in The Journal, an arts and literature magazine of Ohio State University, and
at The Girl Museum, a virtual museum celebrating girls and girlhood. Recipient
of support from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Delaware Division of the
Arts, Tennessee Commission for the Arts, and College English Association, scott’s
most recent project is a multimedia exploration, Breathing Lessons, which explores
the role of the good girl as it is applied to girls of color.
Routledge Research in American Literature and Culture
Wallace and I
Cognition, Consciousness, and Dualism in David Foster Wallace’s Fiction
Jamie Redgate
Articulations of Resistance
Transformative Practices in Arab-American Poetry
Sirène H. Harb
Poetic Encounters in the Americas
Remarkable Bridge
Peter Ramos
The Shape of Fantasy
Investigating the Structure of American Heroic Epic Fantasy
Charul Palmer-Patel
Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel
Joseph M. Conte
Spectres from the Past
Slavery and the Literary Imagination in West African
and African-American Literature
Portia Owusu
Trauma, Gender and Ethics in the Works of E.L. Doctorow
María Ferrández San Miguel

REVISITING THE ELEGY
IN THE BLACK LIVES
MATTER ERA
Edited by
Tiffany Austin, Sequoia Maner,
Emily Ruth Rutter, and
darlene anita scott
First published 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Tiffany Austin, Sequoia Maner, Emily Ruth Rutter, and
darlene anita scott to be identified as the authors of the editorial material,
and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-27638-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-32158-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-85354-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
This book is dedicated in loving memory to Dr. Tiffany Austin
(1975–2018)

CONTENTS
List of Figures xii
Acknowledgments xiii
Preface: “Where Will All That Beauty Go?”: A Tribute to
Poet-Scholar Tiffany Austin 1
Emily Ruth Rutter
Introduction to Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era 9
Emily Ruth Rutter, Sequoia Maner, Tiffany Austin,
and darlene anita scott
PART I
Elegiac Reconfigurations 27
Tony Medina, “Senryu for Trayvon Martin” and “From the
Crushed Voice Box of Freddie Gray” 29
Angela Jackson-Brown, “I Must Not Breathe” 31
Anne Lovering Rounds, “American Diptych” 32
Jerry Wemple, “Nickel Rides: For Freddie Gray” 33
1 Denormativizing Elegy: Historical and Transnational
Journeying in the Black Lives Matter Poetics of
Patricia Smith, Aja Monet, and Shane McCrae 35
Laura Vrana