Living with the Damage: Landscapes of Exhaustion in 21^st-Century African-American Poetry

This talk by Samia Rahimtoola of Bowdoin College reads Dawn Lundy Martin’s Discipline (2011) and Ed Roberson’s City Eclogue (2006) in order to uncover the social and environmental forms of relation that appear under conditions of racialized gentrification. Both books refuse easy narratives of individual overcoming, bodily cure, and environmental repair, instead proposing a catalogue of those who live on beyond hope of repair or reparation. In response to this literary representation of black exhaustion, the talk teases out the political and ethical implications of maintaining relation with what has been abjected. In other words, what can environmentalism learn from the dynamics of vacancy/vagrancy produced by gentrification?