This dissertation argues that abstraction is an important and undertheorized axis through which to think about race and aesthetics in contemporary American literature. The project seeks to work against two critical tendencies: 1) the overwhelming focus on representation, in both quantitative and qualitative terms, when analyzing and interpreting works of art by non-white artists, and 2) the primary way that abstraction, when it is addressed at all, has been characterized in such analyses—namely, as a non-figural visual style that can only be read either as post-racial or else as bluntly referential of some racial content. Against both of these approaches, I suggest that thinking about abstraction as a productive, multifaceted set of aesthetic and social tools can produce an alternate metric by which to describe and evaluate literature’s engagement with race, one which can ultimately move us through the impasse of prescriptive approaches to racial representation.

I take as my case studies four works of experimental poetry by 21st century American writers of color. Chapter One focuses on Simone White’s 2016 book, Dear Angel of Death—in particular, the titular essay that makes up the second half of the book—and its engagement with philosophical and theoretical abstractions. I take up philosopher Charles Mills’ distinction between ideal and non-ideal theorizing as the basis of reading White’s intervention on contemporary Black thought. Chapter Two identifies metadata as a key preoccupation in the genre-bending work of Tan Lin. I focus on his novella, Insomnia and the Aunt, the most conventionally narrative of his works, which ostensibly recounts childhood visits made by a Lin-esque narrator to his Chinese aunt’s motel in rural Washington state. Chapter 3 takes a comparative approach, and examines the visual poetics of Don Mee Choi and Renee Gladman, two writers whose works transmute the pressure put on literary abstraction by racialized visuality into formal transformation.