José Felipe Alvergue examines anger in American poetry, while reflecting on the permissible/policed cultural affects of our time. By way of BIPOC and QTPOC poets engaging with negativity—frustration, anger, distress—Alvergue argues that affects that reflect a counternarrative to benevolence challenge the colonial underpinnings of “American publics” as a concept of democratic participation and practice of community. Purple politics play out daily within spaces we rely on for shared comfort and belonging, namely neighborhoods, dinner tables, school board meetings, and social media. Purplish America describes the uncertain terrain of potential violence, potential conflict, distrust, and post-factualism upon which language and soma are still expected to thrive.
purplish challenges the idea of an objective or unbiased cultural rationale to purple regions in America by historicizing how anger has been systemically cleansed from the collective sentiments regarding nation-building throughout key moments of our national heritage.
“The pad of butter melting onto your tongue, who cares if your taste for it is a self-soothing reaction to systems of violence that shape appetites across generations? Not the system, not the knife, and not the tongue. The only one who cares is the you who coalesces in the work of turning sensation into story, story into anger. Alvergue considers texts of anger less through their authors and more through their shared appetites; appetites that reveal anger as a wisdom, a way of knowing that leads back to lineages of survival and forward into a demos yet to arrive. In this genre-agnostic work of autotheory, Alvergue reads trauma, affect, poetics, aesthetics, and us, all to filth. Wounded and shameless as purplish allows us to be, we can decide it’s a muck we don’t need to crawl out of, a butter we don’t need to spit out, a love that, through our common disobedience, our collective body will forever be melting and metabolizing.”—Farid Matuk, author, The Real Horse
“Alvergue brings together a broad spectrum of poets and theorists, attending very carefully to the ways that their identities position them and their work. At the same time, he allows fresh connections to emerge between apparently dissimilar authors and their writings.”—Sarah Dowling, author, Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood Under Settler Colonialism
