Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor in the Departments of Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, author of
Jovan Scott Lewis is Associate Professor and Chair of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of
“My Bad Attitude toward the Pastoral”: Race, Place, and Allusion in the Poetry of C. S. Giscombe
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Published:October 2023
Chiyuma Elliott, 2023. "“My Bad Attitude toward the Pastoral”: Race, Place, and Allusion in the Poetry of C. S. Giscombe", The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity, Camilla Hawthorne, Jovan Scott Lewis
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This chapter uses C. S. Giscombe’s 1994 book-length poem Here to explore systematically some key ways that songs and poetry document racialized experiences of geography, particularly the shifting boundaries between North and South and between urban and rural. It explores Giscombe’s complex allusions to Jean Toomer’s Harlem Renaissance classic Cane and argues that Giscombe indicates the presence of “Dixie Islands,” much like Shrinidhi Ambinakudige. But Giscombe’s poetic presentation of the geographic phenomenon allows him to spell out the emotional stakes of living in such a shifting world full of latent potential danger, blurry racialized boundaries, and moments of quiet reprieve.
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