(UN)WELCOME IN PRISON. African American Sonneteering and the Limits of American (Literary) Hospitality
(UN)WELCOME IN PRISON. African American Sonneteering and the Limits of American (Literary) Hospitality

Summary/Abstract: According to Jacques Derrida, “unconditional hospitality” requires that you “give up the mastery of your space, your home, your nation” and “accept the risk of the other coming and destroying the place, initiating a revolution, stealing everything or killing everyone” (70–71). The concepts of unconditional hospitality and its inverse, conditional hospitality, apply not only to geopolitical analyses but also to literary studies. Genres and nations share several characteristics. Let us consider the sonnet. Its first “inhabitants” were White European men. The genre had well-established boundaries. Over time, however, non-white, non-male, and non-heteronormative poets have crossed the borders, demanding entry to the restricted space of the sonnet form, often called “prison” by literary scholars and poets. Like newcomers in a foreign land, these “alien” poets had long been denied their “citizenship” as sonneteers. The history of African American sonneteering perfectly illustrates this. To engage in dialogue with the genre’s tradition and to question the culturally oppressive mechanisms of canon formation, Black poets have forced their way into the sonnet. Whereas many have remained within the genre’s boundaries as “guests,” several other African American poets have sought to transform it through formal and thematic alterations. Rephrasing Derrida, one might say that Black poets have “initiated a rebellion” within the sonnet-prison, or sonnet-nation. The question is whether African Americans “destroyed” the sonnet and what has been “the hosts” response to that “intrusion.” In search of an answer, the article explores the host-guest tensions in the context of African American sonneteering, drawing upon Derrida’s theory of “unconditional hospitality.”

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