Presenter(s): Sarah Hovet − English, Journalism
Faculty Mentor(s): Corbett Upton
Oral Session 1SW
Research Area: Humanities
Funding: Humanities Undergraduate Research Fellowship
In current national discourse, what it means to be “American” has become a polarizing issue. In a country built on immigrant labor, the otherness of immigrants has become a point of extreme xenophobia, while indigenous culture continues to be erased. In this context, my research intends to explore the poetics of three Asian-American, Latinx, and indigenous American female poets, respectively, to determine how they construct senses of place in contemporary America and, in the words of Wilbur Zelinsky, how these women “see beyond the dominant culture” and establish counter-places within it. Focusing on Louise Erdrich, Ada Limón, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil as three case-studies, all poets well-recognized for the role of place within their work, this project will apply an array of lenses, political, environmental, and social, to determine the intersections of identity and place these poets trace. This project will examine the intersections of ethnicity and gender in order to understand how these poets present a particularly social or communal sense of place. Critical sources include selections from Wendell Berry’s Home Economics on environmentalism; texts devoted to an indigenous sense of place, such as Louise Erdrich’s Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country and works by Leslie Marmon Silko and Winona LaDuke; and essays by Doreen Massey and Janice Monk that address the role of gender in the construction of a sense of place. The purpose of my research is to create a richer and more inclusive understanding of the spectrum of American identity in contemporary poetics.