Radical Elegies

Scholarship has traditionally characterized elegy as a Eurocentric tradition - a genealogy spanning from ancient Greek pastoral poems via the English elegy to English and Anglo-American Modernist contemporary poets.<br/>Perry examines how these genealogical constructions operate as a means of framing which guides interpretation. This book argues that they reflect a necropoetics - a system of principles precepts and techniques which serve to establish and maintain ideas about whose lives are worthy of being mourned publicly and whose losses matter.<br/>Examining elegies that challenge questions of whose deaths may be grieved; elegies which articulate the various ways in which certain lives are made precarious and disposable; and elegies which interrogate colonial violence structures of white power militarized forms of policing prison-industrial and military-industrial complexes Perry explores possibilities for radical new ways of understanding elegy beyond established genealogical frames.<br/>This study retheorizes some basic terms of analysis of contemporary US poetry and poetics critical race and ethnic studies racial capitalism and contemporary theories of comparative and relational racialization.