For example, in Sofia Coppola’s adaptation of The Beguiled, she omits the role of a Black house servant, citing that she was ‘unable to tell her story’ in the film. I think it’s because they’re not recognising the full potential of the medium. However, the people who write what they know and never deviate from that. You have to have first gotten to grips with the medium of how you’re going to do that, and the best way to do that is to write what you know. Then you apply that craft to try and voice the unknown that is going into aspects of the culture that you’re not normally confronted with – like different socio-economic backgrounds, different geographical locations, trying to imagine the inner mind of a person who you have nothing in common with. To start with the content that is familiar and get comfortable with the craft. I think it’s important to start with what you know and then branch out. There were people judging the difference between Androids and Apple products which shows that even now, you have to deal with subtle barriers. Even within that, it was more of a problem a while ago where people picked up on subtle coded class indicators. ![]() Almost everyone has a smartphone and access to this platform. ![]() Initially, you see social media as a universal liberator. As a working-class poet, she almost has to play the literary field, and that changes how you read contemporary poetry as well – in what ways are poets today navigating the literary marketplace? Even with Instagram – it definitely makes your poetry accessible but at the same time, another set of challenges arise. It’s an anachronism to say it, but she actually wrote it for patronage so that the aristocratic women of her time would support her art – so there’s an intersection of gender and class there. Many people read her work as proto-feminist texts – which is really interesting because there’s a lot of fertile ground for that, but there’s also an intersectional reading of that. In terms of her socio-economic status, she was considered a no-one. In particular, there’s this poet called Emilia Lanier. This module definitely made me more of an intersectional reader of classical poetry. I love that because it does combat this idea of poetry only being accessible to highly educated white men. In this module, we were uncovering the female poetry of the Civil War that used to circulate in manuscripts at the time. Women and people of colour throughout history have been fantastic poets, but much of their work only began to be recognised in the ’90s. We learnt about some excellent poets, who didn’t fit the favoured identity demographic of their time. It really highlighted for me the one thing I really enjoy, and I ended up writing my essay on dealing with the process of discovery in academia. In particular, there was this module on my course called Poetry of Revolution. That goes for a wide range of academic disciplines: in literature, philosophy, the sciences, classical music, forms of “high art” are seen as exclusive for the educated and the upper class, the white, the male, the cis.
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