Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Reading Race

Reading Race

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn

Paperback

Series: South Atlantic Modern Language Association Awards

Poetry CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 0820312738
ISBN13: 9780820312736
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: Aug 1 1990
Pages: 192
Weight: 0.71
Height: 0.54 Width: 6.06 Depth: 9.05
Language: English

Reading Race examines the work of twentieth-century white American poets from Carl Sandburg to Adrienne Rich, from Ezra Pound to Allen Ginsberg, revealing within their poetry and casual writings a body of literature that transmits racism, even as it sometimes speaks against it.

Tracing the persistence of racial discourse, Aldon Nielsen argues that white Americans, throughout their history, have used a language of their own primacy, a language that treats blacks as an abstract other--an aggregate nonwhite--to be acted upon and determined by whites. White discourse drapes over blacks an intricate veil of images and understandings--assertions of inferiority; metaphors of exoticism; similes of animals; tropes of fertility, nothingness, and death--through which whites read race and beneath which blacks remain imprisoned.

Words, Nielsen writes, create and maintain relationships of power as surely as do prisons and arms. Speaking of the discourse of race in America, Nielsen identifies dead metaphors--words, images, ideas--that operate in much the same way as the charged detail of Pound or the objective correlative of T.S. Eliot. Embedded in the language, they are instantly recognizable to the native speaker. Poets, when they draw upon these metaphors, demand racist thinking in order to be understood.

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