The racial imaginary2015

"To think of creativity in terms of transcendence is itself specific and partial--a lovely dream perhaps, but an inhuman one. "It is not only white writers who make a prize of transcendence, of course. Many writers of all backgrounds see the imagination as a historical, as a generative place where race doesn't and shouldn't enter, a place of bodies that transcend the legislative, the economic--in other words, transcend the stuff that doesn't lend itself much poetry. In this view the imagination is postracial, a posthistorical and postpolitical utopia. . . . To bring up race for these writers is to inch close to the anxious space of affirmative action, the scarring qualifieds. "So everyone is here."--Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda, from the introduction In 2011, a poem published in a...