26 – Radical Poetics in the Literary Cultures of South Asia

Long Abstract

Although literary studies have historically constituted an important element of the studies of South Asia in both the recent past and our contemporary times, salient scholarly projects have largely concentrated on a single genre – the novel. This panel attempts to shift the focus on to another genre, which had, and continues to garner attention within much of the non-academic public cultural spaces of the subcontinent – poetry. This panel plans to focus on the ways in which poetry has responded to the key resistance movements in the twentieth and twenty first centuries (including, but not limited to, movements for self-determination and national liberation, de-colonization, anti-caste movements, radical-left movements, labour movements, feminist and queer movements, anti-fascist struggles, struggle for citizenship rights). Following this, it aims to ask whether critical attention to the region’s variegated radical poetics may direct us towards a redefinition of the dominant categories of nationalism, gender, caste, colonialism and postcolonialism, through which the literary scholarships of the region have often tried to interpret it.

In particular, we invite scholars to examine:

1. The often complicated and dialectical relationship between resistance movements and poetic movements/schools
2. Traditions of resistance poetry in the sub-continent
3. Resistance and poetic forms
4. Resistance poetry traditions from the cartographic margins of the national boundaries
5. The emerging resistance poetics in Anglophone South Asian poetry
6. Resistance poetics and its intersection with other arts