Abstract

This thesis examines North American contemporary poetries on the road that reverse the nationalist, mythic formulation articulated by American writers of the 1950s and 1960s. It looks at works by Cecily Nicholson, Nathaniel Mackey, and C.S. Giscombe to examine how all three poets represent the road as a fundamental tool for considering Blackness and histories of racialization and miscegenation. In making visible highway infrastructure in the poetic form, these poets reveal Blackness as a historically constructed social phenomenon and category that is produced and reproduced by infrastructural determinations as well as their organization of space and resources.