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

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.