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The BreakBeat Poets: Translocal Placemaking in the Contemporary Midwestern Lyric

2023; American studies; Volume: 62; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ams.2023.a927984

2153-6856

Andy Oler,

American and British Literature Analysis

The BreakBeat Poets: Translocal Placemaking in the Contemporary Midwestern Lyric Andy Oler (bio) In the introduction to the Haymarket Books collection The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (2015), co-editor Kevin Coval asserts that the anthologized poems are not simply influenced by hip-hop; "these poems are hip-hop."1 The anthology's focus on a genre, a cultural phenomenon, might seem like an odd fit for a special issue on placemaking. Its national frame might seem too expansive for the study of regionalism (though there is a history, established by James Shortridge, of conflating the Midwest with the nation).2 But The BreakBeat Poets is also attentive to more precise versions of "the public cultural spaces of hip-hop praxis."3 Coval exemplifies those spaces through two long-running events in Chicago, a DJ set and an open-mic night, which leads to a discussion of literary events and spaces across the country. At the core of both this book and the series it inaugurates is a relationship between hip-hop and place. The introduction poses it like this: "Hip-hop invited us to write. To do what Gwendolyn Brooks told thousands of young writers in Chicago and everywhere: tell the story that's in front of your nose."4 The BreakBeat Poets has been followed by three volumes in the BreakBeat Poets series: Black Girl Magic (2018), Halal if You Hear Me (2019), and LatiNext (2020). Though the series is international in scope, each volume has multiple Midwestern threads: Haymarket is located in Chicago, each volume has at least one editor who has lived in the Windy City, and many of the poems explore places and experiences throughout [End Page 71] the Midwest. They also represent experiences and scenes that take place in other regions or float above them as concepts and ideas. As a result, none of the volumes can be categorized as simply local, regional, national, or global. This is in part because of the poems' assiduities, as well as the way they move among and between, both within individual poems and from page to page. Still, the spatial awareness built into the series leads to reviews emphasizing each volume's development of community. Alex Billet recognizes an attempt in The BreakBeat Poets to show how hip-hop "culture has sought to bring these fractured pieces of everyday life back together."5 In Black Girl Magic, according to Sequoia Maner, the collection's "vernacular vibe and womanist energy" becomes the method by which the collection attends to "the continued marginalization of black women from within and outside of their own communities."6 Similarly, Mark Eleveld finds that Halal if You Hear Me "is a literary home for the Muslim community and a platform for female voices," and Darshita Jain notes that LatiNext "immediately establishes a community isn't a monolith."7 Because the poets and editors formulate these communities variously as physical or conceptual, and with scopes ranging from the home to the world, I read the BreakBeat Poets series via its crossings. In this article, I approach both the series and the poems within it through the frame of translocality, which anthropologist Clemens Greiner defines as "sets of multidirectional and overlapping networks, constituted by migration, in which the exchange of resources, practices and ideas links and at the same time transforms particular places."8 The four volumes of this series display each of these elements: overlapping networks of identity and culture informed by individual and historical migrations, which highlight both personal change and broader transformations due to the anthologies' and specific poems' juxtaposition of multiple experiences, modes, and affects. Building on arguments by Peter Mandaville, Lara Dotson-Renta, and Jahan Ramazani, this article treats translocality as essentially generative, in which the scalar range of translocality produces experiences and identities that are not beholden to a singular space or form.9 Similarly, with respect to studies of the Midwest, this article engages with studies of specific places but in the context of circulation. Because of the Chicago connections of Haymarket Books and the series editors, it would be tempting to approach these poems in light of William Cronon's argument...