Black Lazarus: Conjure Book

Abstract

Black Lazarus: Conjure Book is a hybrid-genre collection of poems (including lyric, narrative, graphic, prose, and combinations of these four forms) uttered in the voices of fictitious personas based on the participants pictured in, the historical circumstances surrounding, and one inscribed artifact of a postcard depicting the lynching of Allen Brooks in Dallas, Texas on March 3, 1910. The theoretical scaffold for the manuscript is "triangulation," a method used by qualitative researchers to validate their studies by exploring research issues from multiple perspectives. Triangulation is also a mapmaking method used to verify the position of waypoints by measuring them against two or more additional waypoints. In Black Lazarus: Conjure Book, this method of triangulation is used to explore the relationships between subject and object and means of production, and is intended as an alternative to false binaries, which often simplify and generalize complex issues and relationships by presenting them as an inaccurate spectrum stretched between two falsely opposed points, such as "black" and "white," or "male" and "female."