Post-Jazz Poetics: A Social History [Hardcover]

African-American expressive arts draw upon multiple traditions of formal experimentation in the service of social change. Within these traditions, Jennifer D. Ryan demonstrates that black women have created literature, music, and political statements signifying some of the most incisive and complex elements of modern American culture. Post-Jazz Poetics: A Social History examines the jazz-influenced work of five twentieth-century African-American women poets: Sherley Anne Williams, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Wanda Coleman, and Harryette Mullen. These writers engagements with jazz-based compositional devices represent a new strand of radical black poetics, while their renditions of local-to-global social critique sketch the outlines of a transnational feminism.Introduction: How Do I Make That Sound? A New Feminist Poetics Finding Her Voice: The Body Politics of Sherley Anne Williams's Blues Nationhood Re-formed: Revolutionary Style and Practice in Sonia Sanchez's Jazz Poetics Talk to Me: Ecofeminist Disruptions in the Jazz Poetry of Jayne Cortez Shape Shifting: The Urban Geographies of Wanda Coleman's Jazz Poetry Jazz's Word for It: Harryette Mullen and the Politics of Intellectualism Conclusion: 'Too Many Books For Our Eyes': Future Politics, Future Poetries

With utmost sophistication, Ryan explores the contextual dynamics of contemporary African-American feminist poetry. Using the work of five post-jazz women poets as the material for analysis, she identifies varied ideological underpinnings of artistic practices. She maps out inter-medial and inter-discursive spaces where the poetic engages with the performative, the bodily, the social, and the economic. With its argument built around the most aesthetically productive and politically provoking categories, Post-Jazz Poetics is a major voice in the debate on the present state of African-American letters. - Marek Paryz, Assistant Professor, Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw and editor of tlÓ!