Dislocated Voice and Fragmented Self: A Critical Review of Contemporary Lyric in the Works of Claudia Rankine and Ocean Vuong
Abstract
Recent lyric poetry has begun to increasingly move from the Romantic conception of subjective unity to the unified forms of voice, which are fractured, relational and historically conditioned by trauma, racialisation and migration. The poets Claudia Rankine and Ocean Vuong are at the heart of these poetic trends; the forms their voices take engage dislocation, hybridity and bodily memory. This study seeks to look at the ways dislocated voice and fractured self are the core aesthetic and political forms in the work of Rankine and Vuong and to evaluate their importance to contemporary lyric theory. Close reading of the primary texts and synthesis of more recent scholarship in lyric theory and trauma studies, race studies, and migration studies are used for this critical, comparative review approach. The findings show how both poets employ fragmentation, unstable address and mixed modes to signify subjectivity as relational, historical and migrant and as racial. Vuong highlights structures of memory from the body, memory of migration, and "civic and documentary lyric", while Rankine foregrounds intimate, civic, and documentary memory, all of which collectively recalibrate the nature of the lyric voice in a contemporary context. The study ends by arguing that the present lyric is no longer a single, coherent subjectivity but is rather a dislocated, relational, and historically situated mode of expression. It introduces, in both aesthetic and epistemological ways, the theme of fragmentation, which opens a space for lyric to address trauma, migration, and racialised experience in the context of today's literature and to produce a lyric theory that enriches the critical transnational significance of modern scholarship.