Liminality and Otherness: Exploring Transcultural Space in Rita Dove’s The Yellow House on the Corner

Abstract

This paper studies postcolonial responses to prescriptive racial affiliations in contemporary America, tracing the transition of ‘race’ from a biological to a sociocultural concept, and the related rejection of modernist binaries in African-American writing after the 1970s. In her first collection of poems, The Yellow House on the Corner, published in 1980, Rita Dove deconstructs race as a dynamic construct encoded in linguistic and cultural signifiers that turned ethnocentrism into a hegemonic tool rejected by poets writing towards the end of the twentieth century. Positing that Dove’s travels through Europe provide for a cultural and linguistic sensibility that is liminal in its repudiation of cultural absolutism, the paper argues that her writing foreshadows a post-ethnic decentring of race through formulating non-prescriptive affiliations that transcend the colour line. Foregrounding history as a personal, transcultural space where frames of memory are juxtaposed to reveal the constructed nature of racially informed identities and affiliations, the poems create what Steffens terms ‘artistic enspacement’ (28), exhibiting a post-black sensibility that revisits race, memory and history as racialised psycho-spatial domains, and celebrating the fluid nature of identity construction as a journey that must deconstruct race through a transatlantic crossing-over into the domain of the white to reclaim its share in history.