Abstract While M. NourbeSe Philip is often regarded as a black-feminist language poet, her concern about place is equally significant and deserves more critical attention. This essay reads Philip as an Afro-Caribbean poet of place and ponders the geographical implications of her abstract, black-feminism-inspired poetry. Specifically, I focus on her reasoning about “center” and how it engenders formal or verbal matrices in her poems. For Philip, “center” denotes not only the metropole dominating the periphery, but also a place of sufficient being, wholeness, and self-becoming. The second sense of “center” marks the telos of her poetics of place, which, I argue, consists in prevalent and ambiguous uses of the preposition “in” in works like She Tries and Zong!. Center entails an inwardness in response to colonialism-begotten displacement, and Philip’s choreography of “in” affords possibilities for conceptualizing the “placedness” of the Caribbean as well as blackness and black femininity in place.
Wei Liu (Thu,) studied this question.