UC Santa Cruz

More Than a Nation: Toward a New Documentary Poetics identifies multiple contexts—Canada, the U.S., Central America, the Southern Cone, and the Caribbean—in which the term “documentary poetry” names a group of twentieth-century literary forms that use a combination of text, images, archival materials, and found discourse to examine historical events. Demonstrating how this type of writing works as a hemispheric nexus of shared aesthetic practices and political concerns even in vastly different cultural contexts, the dissertation considers how poets such as Ernesto Cardenal, Dorothy Livesay, and Aída Cartagena Portalatín translate and rework the language of state and local archives to pose radical critiques of the hegemonic nationalisms which together worked to construct various myths of racial democracy in the postwar period. Speculatively re-imagining narratives of nation-based citizenship to foreground alternative modes of collectivity, these poets shift our categories for thinking the social, offering visions of new worlds ungoverned by colonial violence and white supremacy—even as their individual texts reify, at times, the coloniality of power. The final chapter considers special issues on “Documentary” published by the U.S. literary magazines Chain, edited by Juliana Spahr and Jena Osman, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, edited by Mark Nowak, to chart the late twentieth-century consolidation of “documentary poetry” as an emergent subgenre. The first in-depth study to consider documentary poetry as a phenomenon coeval in English and Spanish language literatures, More Than a Nation goes beyond existing definitional accounts of this emergent genre to understand documentary poetry as an inter-American network of texts employing archival materials, state documents, and print culture—the stuff of “imagined communities”—in the interest of theorizing social belonging beyond the nation-state.