Chapter 29 - Race

Summary

This chapter considers Elizabeth Bishop’s published and republished uncollected work focusing on her figuration of racial difference in both South and North America. It will engage with existing scholarship on Bishop’s Brazil poetry, as well as her problematic 1965 New York Times Magazine article on Rio’s 400th Carnival. Bishop’s poems engaging with racialised figures (“Manuelzinho,” “Faustina, or Rock Roses,” “Cootchie,” “Songs for a Colored Singer”) will be read against her engagement with and definition of a particular kind of whiteness, often in contrast to the primitive, exotic or native, as observed “In the Waiting Room.” This chapter ultimately maps Bishop’s cartography of racial otherness as a way of exploring the interiority (and integrity) of the self.