Critical Approaches for Re-Conceptualizing the Avant-Garde
An “Aesthetic Apartheid” occurs when the artistic innovations of a minoritized group are neglected due to their difference. [1] The focus on white and western innovations in literature have created the assumption that non-white avant-garde poetry, "however singular its ‘voice’ is not ‘formally innovative’.”[2] Examples of this bias are evident in monographs about the avant-garde, in which people of color are far too often excluded. Dorothy Wang writes that “anyone who has spent time in avant-garde poetry/and or critical circles in the States [….] knows that these circles are overwhelmingly unpigmented.”[3]