Inexhaustible Splendor”
Thylias Moss, Praise Poetry, and Racial Politics
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11271891 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ryan Cull (New Mexico State University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 41 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 125-147 |
| Publication date | 2016-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mlv084 |
| OpenAlex | W2288431972 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 21 |
Thylias Moss has explained that “most of my ... books” are “praise books.” Although her poetry illuminates a simultaneously critical and celebratory tradition that can be traced across the history of African American poetry, it emerges most directly out of the complex legacy of the Black Arts Movement. As a result, her first several collections, published from the early eighties to the early nineties, wrestle with the politics of praise and explore how it has the capacity to reshape one’s sense of identity and attachments to otherness. This essay focuses on the particularly risky form of praise Moss began to develop in three pivotal texts published in 1998: an essay “The Extraordinary Hoof,” a memoir Tale of a Sky Blue Dress , and, most crucially, a poetry collection Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler . Her ongoing poetic project parallels Fred Moten’s and Eve Kosofsky Sedwick’s arguments that literary studies must explore not just more “hope[ful]” affects but “reparative” modes of thinking that are socially “ameliorative.” Moss seeks to use a praise poetics as a means of approaching that which is distant and even transgressive in order to better understand the external and internal mechanisms through which categories of difference are imposed. Praise, in this way, becomes an acknowledgement of an adjacency we too easily deny and a rhetorical means for learning how to live more justly within community.
Art · Art history · Botany · Literature · Media studies · Moss · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Praise · Sociology · Spring (device) · State (computer science) · Computer Science · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Engineering · History · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |