Ironically, sometimes by removing text from its source, erasure can even magnify the original writer’s intent. “Erasure is a collaboration of time and intent. “Like a photograph, a poem or story erases what is outside of its frame-but here’s the curious part, also like a photograph, it captures the unintended, and sometimes that turns out to be the most engaging part of a text: its accidents.” “As readers, it is our responsibility to pay attention to everything in a book-not only the way a writer wants us to read her project, but we should also attend scrupulously to the parts of the book to which the writer is wholly unaware.” Which is to say that at the time I went to high school-which is not so long ago, mind you-it was possible to earn a high school diploma in the United States without any knowledge whatsoever about the literary traditions of Americans of color.” But we learned this correction from the adamant literary commitment of our great migration working class families, not from our schools, teachers, textbooks, nor our school districts. We knew, incorrectly, that there had been a few poets-in fact, there had been hundreds. Worse, I didn’t even know there was such a creature as a black woman who could write fiction. I had never read a novel or short story by any black woman. “I had read every book placed before me, but in all those twelve years of my so-called education, I had never heard the name of one black woman novelist. Throughout her talk, Lewis toggles between the past and present, celebrates writers both famous and obscure, challenges a cannon that is missing far too many writers of color, and surfaces ideas, stories and voices that are essential, especially right now. She gradually widens this lens to talk not only about erasure in literature, but about how history is recorded, remembered or erased how the humanities are taught which stories are published and read, and how this shapes our understanding of our society and our worldview. In this talk, Lewis focuses on a writing practice called “erasure” which is essentially the act of creating a new work out of an existing one by deleting text. Lewis’s career as an academic and poet brings language and visual art, and their histories, to bear on questions of race and gender, both now and in the past. In this episode of The Archive Project, poet, scholar, and National Book Award winner Robin Coste Lewis presents on “The Race Within Erasure.” Lewis first became widely known in 2015, when her debut poetry collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus won the National Book Award in poetry –– it was the first time a poetry debut by an African-American had ever won the prize, and the first time any debut had won the award since 1974. Click here to view the slideshow Lewis references during her lecture.
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