Life-Work: Institutional Constructions of Afro-diasporic Poetics During the Postcolonial Cold War

The politics and poetics of institutional support and conference circuits for poets was well established during the Cold War and post-decolonization. This essay considers rethinking the role of institutional support for poets during the 1964 Rencontre Internationale de Poètes held in West Berlin, Germany. By offering a reading of Afro-diasporic exchange as found in photographs, lectures, and discussion periods in which Derek Walcott and John Pepper Clark engaged, this essay utilizes the “institutional turn” to develop a diasporic ethos predicated upon fissures and ruptures in transnational discourse. Likewise, I analyze engagements that might occur outside of the purview of the institution, which I frame as institutional paratext. This, I argue, enables postcolonial poets to utilize institutions to support Black diasporic exchange. An institutional turn in literary studies has marked a significant shift towards an understanding of literary productions as mediated through varied organizations and institutions. Scholars studying the mediation between literary texts and institutions have noted that organizations imbue literary texts with value, enable and withhold access to audiences, and influence the material constraints through which poets produce their work. This practice of reading the life and work of a poet in continuum is part of a poet’s life-work, wherein centreing communities, institutions, and literary ecosystems presents a holistic representation of what produces the necessary conditions through which poets and their poems come into fruition in the world of letters.