Race, Philology, Capitalism: Nisha Ramayya, Nat Raha, and Daljit Nagra’s ‘Ramayana’

Abstract

This article surveys the work of three contemporary poets, tracing the writing of race within a post-colonial UK context. Using a methodology, derived from the work of Werner Hamacher, which considers philology to be a political investigative tool for studying language, the diasporic imagination and the works of global capital are delineated in the texture of the poetry considered. The article investigates how race figures in this poetry, pursuing the idea of a ‘second linguistic skin’, a corollary to racialisation as a sign of the global, finding it to be a site of projected irreducible difference and attempted de-lexification.