Ethnicity's Impact on Literary Experimentation Rebecca Masker College

Literary experimentation has a tendency to alienate writers of color due parameters of experimentation privileging apolitical identities and valuing the inward voice. These avant-garde literary traditions arguably favor the white, male voice and create a hostile environment for minority writers to produce innovative poetry within. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen seeks to break all these supposed rules and circumvent the intrinsically racist institutions of the avant-garde. She does this by repurposing the form of lyric poetry, and centering it in the public sphere of politics and racial identity. Her subversion of experimental literary conceits of voice and language, her use of multi-media, is motivated by a desire to create a space in which the politicized self can exist within the traditions of the avant-garde

Avant-garde poetry has been criticised for failing to provide a space in which minority writers can flourish and experiment. Joshua Lam describes the genre as existing in a moment when conceptual and avant-garde poetries are being pilloried for their ‘delusions of whiteness’, and when writers of colour whose conceptual techniques are being called out for not toeing the party line arbitrarily drawn by an anonymous coalition....