Poetics Of Resistance Research Articles

The Poetics of Resistance: Christopher Monyoncho’s Fight against Corruption and Abuse of Power

In primordial Gusii cultural identity, the ills of corruption and abuse of power were unheard of. Value for life, a keen sense of justice, respect, mutual goodness with collective responsibility took centre-stage. Then came colonialism and westernisation in the first half of the twentieth century and the communal good and societal values were replaced with self-seeking individualism. Aside from the influence of westernisation and globalisation, capitalistic and paternalistic tendencies by both the so-called former colonial masters and their African successors gave birth to the monsters of corruption and abuse of power. These pushed the Ubuntu spirit into the periphery. This article uses the Benga music of Christopher Monyoncho to analyse the evident cultural identity shifts from the primordial collective societal support to a selfish and self-seeking hybrid identity. The analysis of the literariness of these poetic texts revealed the extent to which prized values of life such as mutual respect and common good which were centred on collective responsibility were watered down and metastasised into scary dragons worth slaying. Indeed, evils such as corruption, grabbing and abuse of power have spawned all over the country and Monyoncho decries such selfish endeavours in several of his popular poetry. This article therefore reads such poetry expositions as a way of laying them bare to the reading public

“The wrong side of the desk”: Material and Discursive Struggle in Bud Osborn’s Downtown Eastside

Abstract Bud Osborn (1947-2014) was an American poet and activist who arrived in Vancouver, Canada in 1986. He landed in Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside (DTES), while struggling with heroin addiction. The DTES is a complex and politically active neighbourhood and site of intersecting social crises. Osborn would spend the remainder of his life capturing this community in his poetry, which is often understood solely through activism for harm reduction and against gentrification. In this article, I engage with his poetry to understand the politics which motivate his activism. This exploration will include a variety of textual mediums, voices, and analytic perspectives to capture the complex politics contained in his words. I believe that by reading his words we can examine his complicated self-positionality as a PWUD (people who use drugs) and a member of the lumpenproletariat who occupied sociocultural spaces that often excluded those from his social standing. This examination shows how he constitutes the DTES as a space of material and discursive struggle. What emerges from this examination is how his poetic resistance at the level of the signifier intertwines with his street-level resistance. That is, how the act of writing and reading poetry can be an act of defiance.

Irish and Palestinian Mythopoetic Cultural Resistance in the Verse of Yeats, Heaney, and Darwish

This academic inquiry delves into the exploration of mythological resilience and poetic resistance in the literary works of W. B. Yeats, Mahmoud Darwish, and Seamus Heaney amidst the contexts of Irish and Palestinian national resistance movements. Through a detailed analysis of major poetic works such as Yeats’s “Deirdre,” Darwish’s “The Phases of Anat,” and Heaney’s “Bog Queen,” the study investigates the ways in which these poets employ mythology, symbolism, and language as mechanisms of opposition against colonialism, oppression, and cultural obliteration. By embracing a comparative approach in literary studies and integrating postcolonial frameworks, the research endeavors to shed light on shared motifs, thematic concerns, and mythopoeic techniques utilized by these writers. Through their examination of mythic narratives, cultural manifestations, patriotism, and the active function of literature as a tool for resistance, this scholarly work addresses notable gaps in existing academic discourse and presents a sophisticated comprehension of how literary creations influence collective awareness and contribute to movements of cultural and national liberation.

OS POEMAS DA GUERRILHA DO ARAGUAIA: uma poética da resistência

This article analyzes the poems Cantar é precise and Eh, Marabá, which have as their theme the Araguaia guerrilla, which are part of a set of poetic texts published in the newspaper Resistência, in February 1979, in Brazil. The analysis considered the historical aspects related to the theme and the identification of the central question: which elements present indicate the framing of the poems in a poetics of resistance.

“A saint, a heroine, and a town”: The incarnation of “rose” and poetics of resistance in Edwidge Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light

AbstractEdwidge Danticat in her novel Claire of the Sea Light (2013) delineates a group of determined women who actively challenge the patriarchal norms prevalent in Haiti. This article conducts a thorough textual analysis focusing on the imagery of the “rose” and its intricate connections with women in the narrative. Through the elaborate naming of Ville Rose, the incarnation of rose as female figures in the novel, as well as the resistance and resilience that rose represents in the female genealogy, Danticat places women at the center of the stage, reclaiming the often neglected, silenced, and marginalized roles of women in Haitian history. This article argues that by foregrounding the unique perspective and experience of Haitian women, Danticat questions the patriarchal hegemonic discourse, reformulates the female discursive system, and reshapes the male‐dominated Haitian literary tradition. This exploration of her poetics of resistance not only contributes to the understanding of Haitian (women's) literature and Caribbean diasporic studies but also provides a new perspective for plant studies within the realm of literature.

New Thai Cinema and the Poetics of Resistance

Throughout its history, Thai cinema has been entangled with institutions of state power. Through invasive systems of censorship and discursive regulation, the state not only regulates public expressions but also sculpts particular forms of national identity, silencing other forms of remembrance and identification. Against these pressures, independent filmmakers in Thailand creatively negotiate the boundaries of state censorship through silences, narrative discontinuities and elliptical plot structures to simultaneously evade state censorship and renegotiate national systems of memorialisation under military rule. This paper investigates how the Thammasat University Massacre is remediated through Anocha Suwichakornpong’s 2016 film Dao khanong (By the Time It Gets Dark), and finds that the film intentionally evades direct representation of the massacre to instead disarticulate national memory cultures and reimagine unconsolidated futures disentangled from institutions of authoritarian power.

Simarrona: Beyond Etymologies toward a Practice of Unlearning

This essay proposes the historical term simarrona (used in colonial Louisiana archives) as a heuristic for unlearning certain reading practices of the term maroon and its persistent “etymology plot.” Simarrona not only troubles the neat linguistic geographies of the term maroon; it foregrounds the instability of colonial grammars and their attendant binaries. The author pairs the poetic resistance with the colonial grammars of Sylvia Wynter, Aimé Césaire, and fahima ife, with the instability of simarrona in the archival record to propose a way of reading archives of marronage that leaves space for that which was withheld.

Poetics of Resistance

Focusing on Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, this article aims to present his resistance poetry as aesthetic embodiment of oral dissemination rather than purely an art form. We can deduce three roles of Darwish’s take on resistance against the backdrop of Palestinian struggle; first is the attempt to subvert patriarchal/colonial ascendency by subjecting traditional affirmations to critical, postcolonial inquiry; second is the attempt to raise the self-esteem of the people by conferring upon them a ‘national sublime’ that emerges from their relentless struggle and sacrifice, and; third the presentation of poetic diction that evolves into a self-reflexive domain galvanizing the people into waging the struggle for their rights.

Poetic Resistance: Girls’ Autograph Albums during World War II in Norway

Poetic Resistance: Girls’ Autograph Albums during World War II in Norway

Le Maya Q’atzij/Our Maya Word: Poetics of Resistance in Guatemala.

Review of the book Emil Keme's book Le Maya Q’atzij/Our Maya Word: Poetics of Resistance in Guatemala.

Poetic Resistance: Girls’ Autograph Albums during World War II in Norway

Poetic Resistance: Girls’ Autograph Albums during World War II in Norway

Creolizing the Nation

Creolizing the Nation

Poetic resistance: Karen long-distance nationalism, rap music, and YouTube

This article investigates a concern among encamped elder Karen refugees (an ethnic minority from Myanmar) living along the Thai–Myanmar border that the youth are disconnected politically and culturally. I argue that Karen youth are creative, active participants reimagining and revitalising Karen politics and culture in their image. I explore how displaced youths have found a voice in Karen rap and how they express this voice in the digitally mediated lived space of YouTube. I consider YouTube as a lived space where citizenship is reimagined and long-distance nationalism is articulated. Finally, I contend that YouTube is transforming Karen youths’ political experiences and mobility and that they are actively political – just not in the way the elders expect.

Ecuadorian Blackness and the Poetics of Resistance and Solidarity in Adalberto Ortiz’s novel Juyungo

This study analyses Adalberto Ortiz’s novel Juyungo (1943) and proposes that, in Juyungo, Ortiz succeeds in articulating an Ecuadorian Blackness by recuperating the legacy of resistance and solidarity of the multi-ethnic and multiracial community of Esmeraldas. The novel’s protagonist, Ascensión Lastre, also known as “Juyungo”, represents both the ancestral ties that have characterised the common experiences of Afro-descendants and indigenous communities in the region as well as the complex position both communities have occupied as part of the cultural, political, and economic project of the Ecuadorian nation.

Writing and Democracy in the Early United States

Writing and Democracy in the Early United States

Colorism and the Poetics of Resistance Among Black Youth: An Application of the Colorist-Historical Trauma Framework

The colorist-historical trauma framework offers scholars, practitioners, and educators a new lens with which to more effectively combat racial disparities in society through the understanding of the intergenerational transmission of colorism in the historical trauma response of African Americans. This article applies the colorist-historical trauma framework to the colorism poems of young African Americans who demonstrate that poetry, as a device of healing, can be a useful mechanism of passing on more than the challenges associated with colorism, but also the art of resistance. The results of this thematic analysis produced three emerging concepts about the poetics of 16 young African Americans and have implications for mental health practitioners, educators, and scholars that uplift the healing process of poetry.

Modern Resistance Poetry in Bangla

Thanks to a bunch of massive movements in the Bangla-speaking region of the Asian sub-continent, i.e. Bangladesh and the Paschim Bangla of India, modern Bangla literature of this region has been enriched with resistance poetry. Resistance literature is the literature of organized resistance movements and national liberation struggles. Very few nations had to fight for rights and liberation, and have very rich resistance literature. There were several resistance movements in this region in the last century. The Liberation War of Bangladesh was the biggest of them and triggered the most remarkable resistance literature, a large number of which is poetry. This movement was so immense both in magnitude and emotional impact that it has been motivating new literature till today. Movements namely the Swadeshi Andolon, the Tebhaga Andolon, the Language Movement and the Movement of the 80’s played no less role in inspiring poetic resistance. This paper critically reviews the major parts of the entire arena of modern resistance poetry written in Bangla in the said Bangla-speaking region. The poetry of resistance that centers the mentioned events has different political and emotional orientations. Poets have their own beliefs and ideologies that are reflected in their creations very clearly. This paper accommodates all possible orientations and beliefs.

The Russian Futuristic Experiment: the Language of the Poetic Resistance

The main Avant-garde trend in the first third of the 20th century, Futurism, through its various groups and creative personalities, upholds its own conception of art and creator, strives to give a contemporary image of the world, to reveal the hidden essence of things, the inner relation of the elements. According to Futurism, art is meant to change lives, but not as it seems in the writings of nineteenth-century realists: by influencing the rational and changing the mind of the reader. The development of a new artistic expression, in a new poetic language, the use of contemporary forms of artistic conditionality have become major tasks for the generation of poets and artists from the 1910s. Poet futurists reduce the language of literature to its traditional understandings, neglect its inherent rules and laws, because they accept it as something external to the subject, which impedes the expression of its essence. From the depiction of the object to its expression - this is how the break in the creative mind of the futuristic author can be characterized. The linguistic revolution, effected with poetic means by the futurists, is a desperate and utopian attempt to acquire the organic integrity of the world, thirsting for its transformation. Thanks to futurism, the register of poetic techniques was expanded in the 20th century and directions were created for the creation of new expressive means of writing poetic text.

Scarcely Translated: Peter Larkin’s Ecopoetic Entanglements

This paper explores Peter Larkin’s poetry within a framework of ecopoetics, attention, and translation. Seeking to provide an overview of the ecological intertwinements in his work, it draws on Larkin’s ‘poetics of scarcity’, which implies a precarious relation between abundance and absence. The resulting notion of being insufficiently with the givenness of the natural world finds its echo in an experimental creative-critical edge of language entangled in a philosophical, theological, and poetical discourse. Resisting economic consumption, Larkin’s alienated poetic register resonates with an ecopoetic decentring of language that pushes against its human limitedness. His poems thus require an increased attention, which, in line with an ecological approach to attention, can stretch towards a horizoning ethical attention to endangered external landscapes. Emerging notions of transformation, interrelatedness, and moving beyond borders are subsequently reinforced by an expanded framework of translation with reference to Larkin’s collection ‘Spirit of the Trees’. As romanticised poems are recomposed in a new environment during a forceful, yet creative act, an-other layer of alienation is revealed with regard to the ecopoetic context of Larkin’s work. Translation is ultimately seen as motion, relation-making, and approximation, which can be extended to the insufficiency of poetry and language itself: From a scarce position, the entanglements in Larkin’s poetry respond to the manifold entanglements of the natural world, their uncanny poetic resistance pointing towards a horizon where a necessarily existential human scarcity opens up spaces for reparative attention.

Ruled by the Pen: A Collection of Poetry and Prose

This project was undertaken with Temple’s CARAS research grant for which I was given the opportunity to travel to Amman, Jordan and interview writers to understand female poetic resistance. It incorporates interview transcripts, secondary research, and my own thoughts and research process woven together into a culmination of poetry and prose to answer this question: How do writers, particularly women in Amman, resist cultural, societal, and political oppression?