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.
Keywords: liberalism; individuation; race; conceptualism; personhood; privacy; social difference
| Title |
Casting Dispersions
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| Subtitle |
Revising Lyric Privacy in Simone White’s Of Being Dispersed
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| Author(s) |
Wendy Lotterman
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| Identifier | |
| Description |
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.
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| Is Part Of | |
| Place |
Berlin
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| Publisher |
ICI Berlin Press
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| Date |
28 October 2024
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| Subject |
liberalism
individuation
race
conceptualism
personhood
privacy
social difference
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| Rights |
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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| Language |
en-GB
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| page start |
183
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| page end |
207
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| Source |
Rethinking Lyric Communities, ed. by Irene Fantappiè, Francesco Giusti, and Laura Scuriatti, Cultural Inquiry, 30 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2024), pp. 183–207
|
Publication scheduled for 28 October 2024
References
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Cite as:
Wendy Lotterman, ‘Casting Dispersions: Revising Lyric Privacy in Simone White’s Of Being Dispersed’, in Rethinking Lyric Communities, ed. by Irene Fantappiè, Francesco Giusti, and Laura Scuriatti, Cultural Inquiry, 30 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2024), pp. 183-207 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-30_08>