Negative Capability, and a Feminist Metaphysics of Place in Meena Alexander’s Birthplace with Buried Stones (2013) and Fault Lines (1993)

Abstract

In Asian American poet Meena Alexander’s work, the costs and erasures of migrancy and dislocation–both temporal and geographic–emerge as negativity dense with insight, opacities immensely generative for the poetic work of (re)making the self in place. Written in the aftermath of the failed promises of the Bandung’s postcolonial vision of non-alignment, hers is a feminist postcolonial poetics that transforms the disarray and unknowing produced by exile into experiential raw material that the poet crafts into nimble, if transitory, knowledge(s) of self, place, ethnicity, gender, and desire. This thesis reads Meena Alexander’s memoir Fault Lines (1993) and her poetry collection Birthplace with Buried Stones (2013) through John Keats’ “negative capability,” Theodor Adorno’s meditations on the lyric form’s societal function, and Audre Lorde’s writings on poetry as an illuminative feminist technology of the erotic to show how Alexander’s poetics evidence a negative capability towards what lies beneath the surface of the actual, passes as implicit or felt truth but cannot quite be integrated into the literal, that offers potent portals into a feminist reclamation of presence and meaning.