White Things

The limited prosodic literacy of revamped formalisms perpetuates the whiteness of lyric reading. By prizing ironic distance and elevating the critic as form's discoverer, the concept of poetic form reinscribes racialized value judgments even where critics hope to valorize nonwhite poetic strategies. Formalism should instead attend to the history that gave poets their sense of form. Nonwhite poets mark how this process of formalization, through which forms become abstracted and bear value, consistently entails racialization. They prompt us, I argue, not to form but to prosodic details whose contingency and phenomenological complexity suspend codes of formalist reading

Archaeology · Biology · Linguistics · Prosody · White (mutation) · White paper · History · Media, Communication, and Education · Philosophy

• Carl Schmitt, Romanticism, and Political Form

  Alexander Freer•Critical Inquiry•2026

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