Reading Claude McKay’s “The Tropics in New York” as a twentieth-century aesthetic equivalent of a slave provision ground, Posmentier argues that the poem asserts cultural autonomy even in the face of the dislocation it describes. In doing so, she suggests that formal lyric poetry can share the burdens and possibilities of these agricultural spaces, insofar as it takes shape in relationship to an oppressive colonial tradition while defining a black expressive form that resists its own utility within the postplantation aesthetic economy. Posmentier reads McKay’s American sonnet in the context of “Quashie to Buccra,” his earlier meditation on agricultural labor and the cultivation of poetic taste, to highlight the narrative of work omitted from the later poem. In fragmenting that narrative, “Tropics” generates an alternative temporality and spatiality of freedom.
Black literary studies raises the question: Is it possible for individuals or groups to “flourish” without collective freedom? After an introduction to Black ecological tropes of flourishing, this chapter draws attention to the late writings of feminist writer Audre Lorde, with emphasis on her accounts of surviving both breast cancer and natural disaster. By framing her story ecologically, Lorde foregrounds not a lyrical account of individual flourishing but rather the socioeconomic, political, and environmental contexts of unfreedom in and through which Black women survive. Deemphasizing the individual psyche as the site of resilience, she nonetheless portrays poetry as the site of resistance because of the access it affords to affect. Thus, Lorde’s writings on survival have further implications for redefining the “positive” in positive psychology, insofar as they direct us away from data-driven (or positivist) methods of measurement and toward feeling as epistemology.
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