Reverse the Curse: Colonialist Legacies of the Magic Poem

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2019 Reverse the Curse: Colonialist Legacies of the Magic Poem Karen E. Lepri The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2984 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] REVERSE THE CURSE: COLONIALIST LEGACIES OF THE MAGIC POEM by KAREN LEPRI A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2019 ii © 2019 KAREN LEPRI All Rights Reserved iii Reverse the Curse: Colonialist Legacies of the Magic Poem by Karen Lepri This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ______________________________ ______________________________ [Date] Wayne Koestenbaum Chair of Examining Committee ______________________________ ______________________________ [Date] Eric Lott Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Wayne Koestenbaum Kandice Chuh Peter Hitchcock THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv ABSTRACT Reverse the Curse: Colonialist Legacies of the Magic Poem by Karen Lepri Adviser: Professor Wayne Koestenbaum This dissertation investigates the conceptual relationships between poetry, magic, and race and their effects on both intellectual and creative practices from modernism through the post-war era. In doing so, this study works cross-disciplinarily, tracing early anthropological and sociological characterizations of primitive religion in connection to early-to-mid-twentieth- century literary study and writing. In working across disciplines at this particularly fungible moment in the history of the academy, this dissertation attempts to understand how the concurrent colonial global context effects the production and organization of knowledge just prior to and during modernism. It ultimately seeks to de-colonize literary thinking about poetry by performing a racial critique of the role of magical thinking in its generic conception and production. The first chapter establishes the intellectual history of the dissertation’s key problem, the presence of primitivism throughout modernist and post-modernish approaches to poetry and the desire for this poetry to offer reparation; examines the ethnographic texts, especially Marcel Mauss’s General Theory of Magic, that relate poetic language to the language of magic ritual and animistic belief systems; considers how these foundational beliefs continued to influence modernist critics like Theodor Adorno and C.L.R. James, and how certain poets and critics attempt to subvert these intellectual trends that associate blackness with magic and magic with poetry; and lastly questions the ethical implications of assuming that poetry’s “magic” could cure v socio-cultural loss. The second and third chapters further develop and test the dissertation’s argument that regardless of poets’ intentions, magic operates within their understanding of poetic function, and that these understandings stem from racist, colonialist understandings of primitive space, time, and culture, while simultaneously attempting to understand their works’ attitude toward poetic reparation. In the second chapter, I examine Gertrude Stein’s 1932 Stanzas in Meditation in an attempt to understand the text’s relationship to concepts of magical language, and its trance-like, reparative effect on readers, an effect complicated by its appropriation of primitivist concepts of time. In the final chapter, I turn to Amiri Baraka’s 1969 compilation Black Magic to explore this work’s relationship to its titular “magic.” I ultimately demonstrate how Baraka’s work re-theorizes a kind of poetic spirituality that eschews white capitalist magic and offers a materialist, pragmatic poetics for surviving racism and strengthening Black consciousness. In concluding, I look to the contemporary moment and claim that the current upswing in the poetry community’s interest in the occult serves as further evidence for one, how the role of magic and poetry corresponds to a social desire for reparation, and, two, how the racialized thinking at stake in the invocation of magic in poetry continues to merit critical and popular examination. vi Acknowledgments I want to thank Professor Wayne Koestenbaum for his tireless advisement on this project—from his much-needed encouragement to his stringent command generally to be “less Catholic” about my approach to writing. It didn’t, he insisted, have to be so difficult, to read or to write. I also am grateful to Wayne for his class “Trance” which inspired me to think more critically about the ways Stein’s abstract work invoked a trance state in the reader and, perhaps, the writer too. I also want to thank my classmates from “Trance,” Iemanja Brown, Talia Shalev, and Wendy Tronrud with whom I worked in organizing the “Trance” conference, which was also foundational to taking magic more seriously as an academic sink hole for me to fall into. I also must attribute my gratitude to Professors Michael Taussig and Michael Golston whose class “The Dialectical Image” at Columbia brought me into contact with Marcel Mauss’s work and Mic’s own work on the concept and practice of magic. Additionally, my gratitude goes to Susan Buck-Morss for her class on “Transcendence” which was fundamental to my curiosity and capacity to think about mystical materialism and to apply this thinking to poetry. I would additionally like to thank my committee members: Professor Kandice Chuh for constantly challenging me to think amply about my project; Professor Peter Hitchcock for pushing me for clarity amidst a highly conceptual project; and Professor Jeremy Glick for attending my IRADAC talk and providing exceedingly helpful and generous feedback toward complicating and encouraging my various understandings of Amiri Baraka. I am so grateful for the time and attention paid to me by these CUNY professors who are continually expected to do more for less than their peers. Lastly, I’d like to thank Professor Herman Bennett and Martin Ruck for their stewardship of the IRADAC fellows program from 2016-2017 during which time I received both valuable mentorship and scholarly support. vii I am ever grateful to the friends who I worked alongside during this process: Iemanja Brown, Matt Longabucco, Liz Goetz, Marissa Brostoff, and Sara Marcus. Special, extra thanks to Liz and Iemanja who read various chapters and provided incredible feedback. These friends’ encouragement and willingness to listen or sit solidly by me as accountability partners was critical to my ability to keep writing, keep editing, and ultimately finish. I would also like to acknowledge one rainy night after pizza with Matt Longabucco and Cole Heinowitz when I was rabidly explaining my indecision between two possible dissertation topics, and they both tipped me this way—they were right, and, indecisive me is ever grateful. An chat with my friend and colleague Eirik Steinhoff was also crucial to helping me to conceive of what made a good dissertation as opposed to a first scholarly book. Sara Jane Stoner’s crunch-time suggestions of contemporary “woo” poets were also extremely useful. I also want to express my deep gratitude to friends and family who provided me with various, much needed writing retreats where significant amounts of drafting took place—Paul Caccamo and Jamie Jorgenson in Provincetown and Germantown, Dawn Lundy Martin and Stephanie Hopkins in East Hampton, and my own parents, Donna and Ron Lepri, in Chatham. Last, but hardly least, I am ever grateful to my partner, Causten Rodriguez-Wollerman for witnessing me throughout the final years of this project, for coaching me on my elevator pitch again and again, for helping me to clarify the racial politics and personal urgency of this dissertation, and for his ceaseless confidence in me and support in all forms. viii Preface I began this project with two suspicions. First, I suspected that many white modernist poets, not seeming to invoke race, often did through their assumptions about the relationship between poetry and magic. Furthermore, I suspected that the white modernist poets typically studied for invoking occultism, through textual reference or life practice, were not merely drawing inspiration from a Eurocentric mythology of a European past, but rather that their relationship to a temporal otherwise, the long-past of history, was inextricable from the coloniality of their world. In this vein, due to my investment in decolonializing conceptions of the poetry genre,1 my study calls itself a study in modernism despite encompassing a period of time from the late 1800s through the 1960s. While focusing on one high modernist poet who fits squarely in the period, Gertrude Stein, and one Black Arts poet who falls about twenty years later, Amiri Baraka, the intellectual formations which I argue influence poetic practice (and vice versa) come to fruition through the organization of anthropological knowledge from the 1870s through the 1910s. My suspicions about colonialism, modernism, and anti-colonialism’s relationships to each other, and my desire to ask how various conceptualizations of magic

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