Disordering the Border: Harryette Mullen’s Transaborder Poetics in Muse & Drudge
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 racialized 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.
The feminist avant-garde in American poetry
The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry offers a historical and theoretical account of avant-garde women poets in America from the 1910s through the 1990s. Elisabeth Frost focuses on a diverse group of poets - Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Sonia Sanchez, Susan Howe, and Harryette Mullen - who make language the site of feminist politics. Her study captures the range of aesthetics and politics in the work of avant-garde women poets; challenges the ways in which avant-garde writing has been defined and categorized; expands traditional conceptions of feminism and feminist poetics; and addresses issues of gender and race, allowing for discussion of a rich range of feminist and linguistic concerns.
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.