Recalling Recitation in the Americas: Borderless Curriculum, Performance Poetry, and Reading
© 2017
Spoken word is one of the most popular styles of poetry in North America. While its prevalence is often attributed to the form’s strong ties to oral culture, Recalling Recitation in the Americas reveals how poetry memorization and recitation curricula, shaped by British Imperial policy, influenced contemporary performance practices.
During the early twentieth century, educators frequently used the recitation of canonical poems to instill "proper" speech and behaviour in classrooms in Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States. Janet Neigh critically analyses three celebrated performance poets - E. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake (1861-1913), Langston Hughes (1902-1967), and Louise Bennett (1919-2006) - who refashioned recitation to cultivate linguistic diversity and to resist its disciplinary force. Through an examination of the dialogues among their poetic projects, Neigh illuminates how their complicated legacies as national icons obscure their similar approaches to resisting Anglicization. Recalling Recitation in the Americas focuses on the unexplored relationship between education history and literary form and establishes the far-reaching effects of poetry memorization and recitation on the development of modern performance poetry in North America.
Product Details
- World Rights
- Page Count: 256 pages
- Dimensions: 6.3in x 0.8in x 9.3in
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Reviews
"In this illuminating and provocative study of performance poetry of the Americas, Janet Neigh makes a compelling case for a revisionary understanding of the genre as operating not only in the interstices of speech and writing but also in between cultures and nations."
Sarah Phillips Casteel, associate professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Carleton University"Neigh’s Recalling Recitation in the Americas takes a fresh and valuable approach to the intersection of orality and literacy, live performance, and the forces of transnational, or, as Neigh prefers, hemispheric, cultural interactions in the verbal arts."
Susan Gingell, professor emerita, Department of English, University of Saskatchewan -
Author Information
Janet Neigh is an associate professor of English at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. -
Table of contents
Acknowledgments
IntroductionChapter 1
E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) and Her "Dear Dead Longfellow"Chapter 2
Langston Hughes’s Rhythmic LiteracyChapter 3
Miss Lou Pedagogy and Mimic WomenChapter 4
Recitation Legacies in Dub and Indigenous PoeticsNotes
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