Disordering the border: Harryette Mullen's transaborder poetics in Muse & Drudge

Date
2014
Authors
Reimer, J. A.
Editor(s)
Advisor
Supervisor
Co-Advisor
Co-Supervisor
Instructor
Source Title
Print ISSN
1920-1222
Electronic ISSN
Publisher
The Johns Hopkins University Press and University of Calgary
Volume
45
Issue
3
Pages
151 - 183
Language
English
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Series
Abstract

This essay reads Harryette Mullen's epic poem Muse & Drudge as an innovative text of the US-Mexico borderlands by focusing on Mullen's literal and figurative transactions between multiple discourses, including Spanish, and the corresponding sets of material conditions these discourses conjure to understand how Muse & Drudge reveals the ongoing racialization and exploitation of African American women and Latinas. I identify a transaborder politics in Muse & Drudge in which shared colonial histories unite Afro-Caribbean diasporic and borderlands subjects. In Mullen's poetics, themes of separation, definition, and regulation are racial-ized concepts, deeply embedded in the violent histories of racial mixing and mestizaje that are both named outright and alluded to metaphorically by her hybridized language.

Course
Other identifiers
Book Title
Citation
Published Version (Please cite this version)