Department of English

• Thursday, September 10, 2026 - 3:30pm to 6:30pm

Fisher-Bennett Hall Faculty Lounge (room 135)

You are warmly invited to join the public portion of Andrew Smyth's dissertation defense on Thursday, September 10, 4:30-5:30pm EDT in the Fisher-Bennett Hall Faculty Lounge (room 135).

Title: "Positions of Enunciation: Disfiguring the Racial Grammar of American Poetic Form"

Committee: Simone White (Chair), Al Filreis, Josephine Park

Abstract:  This dissertation examines the productivity of racial signification in the American poetic field. Through the framework of enunciative positionality, it tracks the deployment of Black, Indigenous, and Asian figures as props and foils for the experimental text, rendering how these trope-systems undergird white avant-gardism. Arguing that the cultural scripts of minstrelsy, playing Indian, and yellowface haunt literary modernism and its posts, I investigate how these modes of ventriloquism are glossed and deconstructed (re/nonperformed) in contemporary poetic practice. Discussions of orthography, syntax, and typography suggest how systems of graphic representation are themselves embedded with a raced conceptuality, a dynamic I refer to as racial graphesis. Throughout, my readings foreground a particular convergence of commodity, racial, and poetic form, in which differential relations to value, property, and labor correlate with a set of racialized symbolic functions (fungibility, disposability, and contingency) that negatively ground white universality. As a structure of inheritance, I find, the enduring raciality of the American poetic text symptomizes the recursive legacies of slavery, settler colonialism, and U.S. empire in the political and libidinal economies of late capitalism.

Those who wish to attend the public portion of the defense remotely may do so via Zoom; please contact Andrew for the link.