During Black History Month 2024, University of Alberta Press is publishing Canadian writer and poet Wayde Compton’s lecture, Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics, based on the 17th annual Kreisel Lecture at the U of A in March 2023.
Compton's words continue to inspire through a recording of the lecture, thanks to the Faculty of Arts' Centre for Literatures in Canada, and now in this publication.
"I'm so excited about the publication of this lecture," says Sarah Wylie Krotz, associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies, and director of the Centre for Literatures in Canada. "It will be a transformative resource for poets, literature teachers and thoughtful readers of all kinds."
In Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics Compton foregrounds the role of writers in recovering long-suppressed or devalued traditions while critiquing the Western standard that measures excellence by the level of innovation. Learn more about Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics in the excerpt below, and delve into this timely reflection on the complexities of race, power and creativity.“... the white avant-garde makes an impregnable fetish of innovation as progressive, and conversely regards tradition, generally, as regressive and facile. The effect here is to blot out projects of cultural recovery that can be crucial to the progress of writers whose traditions have been forcibly repressed; a further effect of the Western innovation fetish is that white avant-garde writers with this viewpoint will fail to see how they might learn from writers engaged with other traditions, which they regard as temporal cul-de-sacs rather than alternately legitimate chains of influence. In simpler terms, the white avant-garde fails to see itself as an ethnic literature that ought to look at other literatures from that position, rather than from the position of being literature as such….
I have never felt that my subjectivity is universal or outside a cultural or racial position. The sensation— or perhaps the lack of sensation—that one must feel when they are lined up squarely to the norm is something I can only imagine.
This is true for so many of us, in different ways: those who are born into the governance of the Indian Act; those who are immigrants; those who have suffered a racially biased carceral system; and so on….
The question then becomes, how do we relate across these positions when we let go of the false goal of building a universal aesthetic?...
When you start putting together the biases that dominate white avant-garde praxis, what is revealed is far from anti-racist method, but in fact is a startlingly effective phalanx against cross-cultural appreciation in the arts. What sneaks into its formula of cultural taste for innovation is something I will call temporal exceptionalism: in short, the sense that the timeline of Western culture is the one by which all other cultural timelines must pace themselves, that innovations within Western culture are innovations of all form itself, and that innovations to other traditions are not therefore innovative at all…. In this frame, where does one put the poet working in a tradition of Cree storytelling, or Persian verse forms, or dub poetry, who innovates those inherited traditions?... It is in cultures where valuable traditions were violently suppressed and broken that we can see how forward (dialectical) innovation in culture is not automatically positive.…
Are there writers of colour left behind along the way, the ones who saw no space for themselves inside a supposedly universal thing called poetry, and who left the vocation altogether? The answer to that is a definite yes. In this racism-without-racists, the attrition is rendered nearly invisible, but I know it is real. We lose writers this way. We lose scholars. We are less because of ideologies of universalism, not more.”
Excerpt from Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics by Wayde Compton, provided by University of Alberta Press.