On “roots, pollution, and … the [im]purity of lineage”: Race in Natasha Trethewey’s Thrall

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore how Natasha Trethewey—arguably one of the most important contemporary American poets and a mixed-race person—confronts the issue of race on various, though arguably inseparable, levels: personal, linguistic, and one pertaining to the history of humanity and the American nation. I operate within the frame of recent conceptualizations of race as a phenomenon rationalized by racism, following the poet’s trajectory present in her ekphrastic poems from Thrall—i.e., from roots of race represented in European visual arts (“Miracle of the Black Leg”) to its pollution and a question of (im)purity of lineage (“Taxonomy” and “Enlightenment”). At the same time, the article demonstrates how race, although it has been scientifically proven not to exist, is constituted by racism, to which it is a necessary excuse and alibi.