Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century

This book examines the work of 20th 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 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. Speaking of the discourse of race in America, Nielsen identifies
dead methphors
- words, images, ideas - tha toperate in much the same way as the
charged detail
of Pound or the
objective correlative
of T.S.Elliot. 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.