The Para-Lyric, (Non-)Performance, and Personhood

In this article, I discuss two lyric poems—Mary Robinson’s “The Lascar” and William Wordsworth’s “Gipsies”—to argue that they engage with what could be dubbed “para-lyric.” Despite presenting itself in the lyric form, this mode critiques the form, specifically the narratable interiority of liberal subjectivity and the disembodied abstraction of voice. Para-lyric functions in this zone of inefficient linguistic communication, forcing the racialized bodies and their alternative ways of being to be brought back into the scene. In place of liberal personhood, which is deeply entangled with the lyric form, the “para-lyric” offers another version of personhood that could function with the paradoxical recognition of opacity, performativity, and “refusals” to enter the circuit of circulation that the burgeoning colonial-capitalist set-up mandates. I choose two lyrics written by “English” poets to demonstrate that “Asian” performance, in being unable to engage in language across racialized lines of sympathy and recognition, manages to “affect” the English and even disturb them. The lack of a readily available English framework to make sense of this “affect” is what adds to the performance’s potential to offer fugitive lines out of the liberal order and imagine new ways of engaging the racialized Other.