Violence and citizenship in 21st-century American documentary poetics

This dissertation examines documentary poetics as record of and response to racist violence in the context of American citizenship. I read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), Philip Metres’s Sand Opera (2015), and Joy Harjo’s Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015) as challenging the generic conventions of documentary poetics, which Joseph Harrington defines as “relat[ing] to historical narratives” by “contain[ing] quotations from or reproductions of documents” (Jacket2). Documentary poetics exceed official documentations as they respond to the violences they recount. Rankine, Metres, and Harjo propose practical modes of ethical response to violence for different readers by crafting historically grounded, polyvocal conversations among scholars and critics as well as unconventional documents such as the spoken word and visual art. Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy scaffolds my consideration of responses to the other’s suffering and dying, particularly the other who defines exclusionary frameworks of citizenship in this study. I examine the precarity of twenty-first century American citizenships as shaped by historical, cultural, and legal contexts including the policing of Black and brown bodies, the social and political violences of the War on Terror, and the ongoing physical and legal dispossession of Native peoples. All three texts theorize and enact poetics that invite their audiences to participate and model ways for all people – not solely artists or devoted activists – to challenge the injustices that characterize contradictory experiences of American citizenship, arguing for poetry’s potential to respond to the suffering of the Levinasian other and build community in a nation of fractured citizenry.