Disordering the Border: Harryette Mullen's <i>Transa</i>border Poetics in <i>Muse & Drudge</i>

Authors

  • Jennifer Andrea Reimer Bilkent University

Keywords:

Harryette Mullen, African American Poetry, Experimental American Poetry, U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Feminism

Abstract

This essay reads Harryette Mullen's epic poem, Muse & Drudge, as an innovative text of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands by focusing on her literal and figurtive 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 indentify a "transaborder politics" in Muse Drudge where the shared colonial histories unite Afro-Caribbean diasporic and borderlands subjects, and in the literal and figurative transactions between multiple discourses and the corresponding sets of lived, material conditions these discourses conjure. As part of her poetics, themes of separation, definition, and regulation are racialized concepts, deeply embedded in the violent histories of racial mixing and mestizaje that are both named outright and also alluded to metaphorically through Mullen's hybridized language.

Author Biography

Jennifer Andrea Reimer, Bilkent University

Jennifer A. Reimer, assistant professor in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, received her PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011, and her MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco in 2005.  Her scholarly interests focus on hemispheric and transnational American studies, with emphasis on race, ethnicity, and gender in contemporary American literary and cultural studies. She is the 2011 winner of the Gloria E. Anzaldua Award for Independent Scholars, awarded by the Women's Committee of The American Studies Association.

As a creative writer, Jennifer is active in the literary community. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in a number of journals. Her first prose poetry book, The Rainy Season Diaries, was released in November 2013 by Quale Press. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Achiote Press.

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Published

2014-12-01

Issue

Vol. 45 No. 3 (2014): July 2014

Section

Articles

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