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Forthcoming
Book Section
Wendy Lotterman Casting Dispersions: Revising Lyric Privacy in Simone White’s Of Being Dispersed
This chapter examines the refusal of privacy in Simone White’s 2016 collection Of Being Dispersed. Writing within the lyric mode, White’s defiantly public subject draws attention to the lyric’s generic proximity to liberalism, in which individuation is a precondition of recognition and race is thus read as an identity rather than the effect of a social process. By comparing White’s book with George Oppen’s 1968 poem ‘Of Being Numerous’, I argue that ‘dispersal’ names the condition of a racialized subject whose individuation is not in the first place given, whereas ‘numerousness’ names an aspiration to move toward assembly from an original interiority.
2024. liberalism; individuation; race; conceptualism; personhood; privacy; social difference