Hambone's call: Nathaniel Mackey and editorial poetics. Issue 6 (2nd June 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Foley, Abram
• Is Part Of: Textual practice. Volume 34:Issue 6(2020)
• Page Start: 881
• Page End: 901
• Publication Date: 2020-06-02
• Subjects: Nathaniel Mackey -- African American literature -- editing -- publishing -- poetry -- literary journals; Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals; Semiotics -- Periodicals; 801.95
• DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2018.1517104
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0950-236X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This essay examines Nathaniel Mackey's editorship of the literary journal Hambone . Placing Mackey's editorship in conversation with his theory of 'discrepant engagement', which he describes as a stylised practice that seeks to open 'presumably closed orders of identity and signification', I argue that Mackey develops an editorial poetics that opens American literary culture to a deep history of African American and cross-cultural creative expression and improvisation. The history of such improvisation – often taken up in the face dispossession – transforms Mackey's editorial poetics into a sustained reflection on concepts of labour and hospitality at work in everyday creative practices.