Graduation Year
2017
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
English
Reader 1
Warren Liu
Reader 2
Michelle Decker
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2017 Rachel A Miller-Haughton
Abstract
This paper discusses the poetry of Audre Lorde and Natasha Trethewey, and the ways in which they bring to attention the often-silenced histories of African American females. Through close readings of Lorde’s poems “Call” and “Coal,” and Trethewey’s “Three Photographs,” these histories are brought to the present with the framework of the words “call” and “re-call.” The paper explores the ways in which Lorde creates a new mythology for understanding her identity as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” in her innovative, intersectional feminist poetry. This is used as the framework for understanding modern poets like Trethewey, whose identity as a biracial black woman from the American South colors her lyric, more formal work. Lorde uses the vocal, oral tradition of calling as Trethewey relies on visual, gaze-focused recall. Recall is memory and re-call means bringing the hidden past into the future. The paper concludes by saying that all black female writers may participate in their own ways of calling out the truth and remembering what should be forgotten.
Recommended Citation
Miller-Haughton, Rachel, "Re-Calling the Past: Poetry as Preservation of Black Female Histories" (2017). Scripps Senior Theses. 1005.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1005
Included in
African American Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons
