Black Poetics, Black Politics: Poetry of the Civil Rights Movements in Australia and the United States, 1960s-1980s

Abstract

Aboriginal poets Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker; 1920–1993) and Lionel Fogarty (1958–), and African American poets Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones; 1934–2004), and Sonia Sanchez (1934–) were prominent in the struggles of their peoples during the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and beyond. Fogarty and Sanchez are still politically engaged. Their poetries display common elements that enable a transcontinental comparative reading. This project examines the works of these poets to demonstrate their role in the struggle for civil and human rights of their peoples during this period. The project’s confluence of poetics and politics is original because it aims to show how these poets collaborated with other civil rights activists in voicing the demands of their peoples, and how they used their poetry to reflect the realities they experienced and to imagine new possibilities. This close, comparative analysis shows how these poets developed a distinctive rhetoric of resistance that drew on the ideas of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). As such, it contributes to comparative studies of Australian and American political history by demonstrating how these poets resist cultural and linguistic hegemony and oppose literary universalism in representing their peoples’ cultures and languages. This project also highlights how, through poeticizing some of the milestone events in their histories, these poets revive their peoples’ own history. Instead of tracing the general development of Aboriginal and African American poetries during this period, I narrow the scope of my research to the poetries of the selected poets. In preference to examining the literary development of these poets via a timeline, which may render each chapter in the form of a literary history, this qualitative study is grounded instead in a comparative analysis of content which examines how these writers demonstrate compositional and structural similarities and differences in their poetries, despite their responses to relatively distinct literary and political influences. This thesis places the work of these poets in broader, international contexts, by drawing vivid trans-Pacific connections between their poetries and politics. Black Poetics, Black Politics: Poetry of the Civil Rights Movements in Australia and the United States: 1960s-1980s aims to show the connection between African American poets of the Black Arts movement and Aboriginal poets of the 1960s and 1970s.