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<p>Few symbols of 1950s-1960s America remain as central to our contemporary conception
of Cold War culture as the iconic ranch-style suburban home. While the house took
center stage in the Nixon/Khrushchev kitchen debates as a symbol of modern efficiency
and capitalist values, its popularity depended largely upon its obvious appropriation
of vernacular architecture from the 19th century, those California haciendas and Texas
dogtrots that dotted the American west. Contractors like William Levitt modernized
the historical common houses, hermetically sealing their porous construction, all
while using the ranch-style roots of the dwelling to galvanize a myth of an indigenous
American culture. At a moment of intense occupational bureaucracy, political uncertainty
and atomized social life, the rancher gave a self-identifying white consumer base
reason to believe they could master their own plot in the expansive frontier. Only
one example of America’s mid-century love affair with commodified vernacular forms,
the ranch-style home represents a broad effort on the part of corporate and governmental
interest groups to transform the vernacular into a style that expresses a distinctly
homogenous vision of American culture. “Other than a Citizen” begins with an anatomy
of that transformation, and then turns to the work of four poets who sought to reclaim
the vernacular from that process of standardization and use it to countermand the
containment-era strategies of Cold War America.</p><p>In four chapters, I trace references
to common speech and verbal expressivity in the poetry and poetic theory of Charles
Olson, Robert Duncan, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks, against the historical
backdrop of the Free-Speech Movement and the rise of mass-culture. When poets frame
nonliterary speech within the literary page, they encounter the inability of writing
to capture the vital ephemerality of verbal expression. Rather than treat this limitation
as an impediment, the writers in my study use the poem to dramatize the fugitivity
of speech, emphasizing it as a disruptive counterpoint to the technologies of capture.
Where critics such as Houston Baker interpret the vernacular strictly in terms of
resistance, I take a cue from the poets and argue that the vernacular, rooted etymologically
at the intersection of domestic security and enslaved margin, represents a gestalt
form, capable at once of establishing centralized power and sparking minor protest.
My argument also expands upon Michael North’s exploration of the influence of minstrelsy
and regionalism on the development of modernist literary technique in The Dialect
of Modernism. As he focuses on writers from the early 20th century, I account for
the next generation, whose America was not a culturally inferior collection of immigrants
but an imperial power, replete with economic, political and artistic dominance. Instead
of settling for an essentially American idiom, the poets in my study saw in the vernacular
not phonetic misspellings, slang terminology and fragmented syntax, but the potential
to provoke and thereby frame a more ethical mode of social life, straining against
the regimentation of citizenship.</p><p>My attention to the vernacular argues for
an alignment among writers who have been segregated by the assumption that race and
aesthetics are mutually exclusive categories. In reading these writers alongside one
another, “Other than a Citizen” shows how the avant-garde concepts of projective poetics
and composition by field develop out of an interest in black expressivity. Conversely,
I trace black radicalism and its emphasis on sociality back to the communalism practiced
at the experimental arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Olson and
Duncan taught. In pressing for this connection, my work reveals the racial politics
embedded within the speech-based aesthetics of the postwar era, while foregrounding
the aesthetic dimension of militant protest.</p><p>Not unlike today, the popular rhetoric
of the Cold War insists that to be a citizen involves defending one’s status as a
rightful member of an exclusionary nation. To be other than a citizen, as the poets
in my study make clear, begins with eschewing the false certainty that accompanies
categorical nominalization. In promoting a model of mutually dependent participation,
these poets lay the groundwork for an alternative model of civic belonging, where
volition and reciprocity replace compliance and self-sufficiency. In reading their
lines, we become all the more aware of the cracks that run the length of our load-bearing
walls.</p>
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