Poetics Of Resistance Research Articles

Lesen unter der Diktatur. Die estnische Spielart des Totalitarismus

The Poetics and Reception of Hidden Resistance: the Estonian Game of Totalitarianism. Where, with whom or with what does totalitarianism begin? An answer in the spirit of Hannah Arendt would be: at the moment when people stop thinking; at the moment when they allow themselves to be turned into instruments of a totalitarian regime. By what means does a totalitarian society achieve that moment?What means does a person have to fight against such an instrumentalization at that moment? What are the means of writers, whose essential nature should be that they never stop thinking? How does a writer working in a totalitarian society manage to create a free space, a place to think, in a situation governed by a single way of thinking that can only be expressed in one language: that of totalitarianism? How does a reader create his or her free space for thinking? What do reading and writing mean in a society that prohibits or hinders free expression and thought for authors and readers?Totalitarianism does not work everywhere in the same way. European history alone has seen different forms of totalitarian power, its ways of ruling depend on the socio-historical development of the society. Literary reactions to totalitarian power are also different: totalitarianism in Nazi Germany was different from that of DDR, which, in turn, was different from practices in Soviet Estonia.In my article, I approach these questions from a very personal perspective, remembering my own reading experiences in the totalitarian society of Soviet Estonia. I can only discuss the years from 1983 to 1985, because earlier I read children’s literature, and afterwards the Soviet regime was already falling apart.I will study communication between readers and authors in the totalitarian society and thereby determine the main difference between the factors that shaped the reading situation in Estonia and the DDR. In Estonia, readers and authors were able to outsmart the totalitarian rule thanks to the cultural continuity based on a symbolic language (rooted in cultural memory), which owes its existence to the fact that totalitarianism was perceived as something foreign, something speaking another language. In the DDR, the poetics of resistance had to be built on a different foundation, since the national culture of the past as a source of identity had been devalued by recent history and was not a suitable basis.

The poetics of resistance and the politics of crossing borders: Korean hip-hop and ‘cultural reterritorialisation’

AbstractThis paper examines the ways in which hip-hop has taken root in Korean popular culture. The processes that began in the early 1990s include appropriation, adaptation and ‘cultural reterritorialisation’. By looking at recent Korean hip-hop outputs and their associated contexts, this paper explores the ways in which Korean hip-hop has gained its local specificities. This was achieved by combining and recontextualising Afro-American and Korean popular musical elements and aesthetics in its performance and identification in the context of the consumption and commodification of Korean hip-hop as a ‘national(ised) cultural product’.

The Narrative Turn and the Poetics of Resistance: Towards a New Language for Critical Educational Studies

This article argues for the adoption of a new language in critical educational studies through the ‘narrative turn’, a turn that politicizes knowledge by drawing attention to questions concerning the meaning, construction and authorship of narratives. In the authors' interpretation going back to the poetics of early narrative forms they development the argument that there is an ancient history of the form that privileges it as a means and form of resistance. The article tracks the adoption of narrative in the human sciences and details the development of narratology as the scientific study of narrative by such luminaries as Paul Ricoeur, and describes the ‘crisis of narrative’ in the postmodern condition by reference to the work of Lyotard, who begins to problematize the ‘metanarrative’ and its role in legitimation processes. This political understanding of narrative is further explored in relation to ‘narrative identity’ through the work of Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha and Charles Taylor and their emphasis on social imaginaries.

Chanting Tahreer and Compassion: People as Poetry


 The contention of this essay is that the current Arab revolutions of the so-called Arab Spring must be seen in the context of broader resistance in the colonized Muslim world to global political modernity. This essay focuses especially on the constitutive role that poetry plays in resistance to colonialism and violence. After situating this general phenomenon of poetic resistance in a global context with reference to Abdelrahman Munif, Mahmoud Darwish and Langston Hughes, I examine the deep constitutive role of poetry in the revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt in 2010-11. I illuminate the beauty and meaningfulness of the poetry in the quotidian experience of those peoples making revolutions. Poetry runs through the lives, the feelings, and, importantly, the politics of their world, a world that includes pride in Arab values and solidarity against the ongoing violence and injustices of authoritarianism and occupation. My dwelling and meditation on poetry helps elaborate a vision of the new Arab revolts.

Performing rap ciphas in late-modern Cape Town: extreme locality and multilingual citizenship

The study of hip-hop in Cape Town, and indeed South Africa, has traditionally focused on the narratives and poetics of resistance, race and counter-hegemonic agency in the context of apartheid and the early days of post-apartheid. Despite this attention, hip-hop cipha performances remain relatively under-researched. The aim of this paper is to suggest that cipha performances display linguistic and discursive features that not only are of particular interest to rap music and hip-hop on the Cape Flats of Cape Town speci cally, but that also engage core issues around multilingualism, agency and voice more generally. It demonstrates how in the process of entextualization a sense of locality, extreme locality, emerges in cipha performances by means of verbal cueing, representing place, expressing disrespect (dissing), and the (deictic) reference to local coordinates that is achieved by transposing or recontextualizing transidiomatic phrases, and by incorporating local proxemics and audience reactions through commentary and response. It concludes by suggesting that competition around acceptable linguistic forms and framings (metalinguistic disputes) of extreme locality comprise the very micro-processes behind the formation of new registers. At the same time, these registers create the semiotic space for the exercise of agency and voice through multilingual practices, that is, multilingual citizenship. Key words: multilingualism, hip-hop, rap, extreme locality, multilingual citizenship, Cape Town

Performing rap ciphas in late-modern Cape Town: extreme locality and multilingual citizenship

The study of hip-hop in Cape Town, and indeed South Africa, has traditionally focused on the narratives and poetics of resistance, race and counter-hegemonic agency in the context of apartheid and the early days of post-apartheid. Despite this attention, hip-hop cipha performances remain relatively under-researched. The aim of this paper is to suggest that cipha performances display linguistic and discursive features that not only are of particular interest to rap music and hip-hop on the Cape Flats of Cape Town specifically, but that also engage core issues around multilingualism, agency and voice more generally. It demonstrates how in the process of entextualization a sense of locality, extreme locality, emerges in cipha performances by means of verbal cueing, representing place, expressing disrespect (dissing), and the (deictic) reference to local coordinates that is achieved by transposing or recontextualizing transidiomatic phrases, and by incorporating local proxemics and audience reactions through commentary and response. It concludes by suggesting that competition around acceptable linguistic forms and framings (metalinguistic disputes) of extreme locality comprise the very micro-processes behind the formation of new registers. At the same time, these registers create the semiotic space for the exercise of agency and voice through multilingual practices, that is, multilingual citizenship.

Poetics of resistance: ecocritical reading of Ojaide's 'Delta Blues & Home Songs' and 'Daydream of Ants and Other Poems'

Nigerian written poetry spans about six decades, from its inception, and has been a medium of engagement, decrying colonialism, cultural imperialism, socio-economic oppres- sion and political tyranny. Tanure Ojaide's poetic enterprise follows in the footsteps of this mould of interdiction, which can be called resistance poetics. Particularly, his collections of poetry, Delta Blues & Home Songs and Daydream of Ants and Other Poems, are illustrations of ecocritical literature. Ecocriticism in literature is a form of aesthetics that concerns itself with the nature of relationship between literature and the natural environment. Ojaide consid- ers the ecocritical art of poetry as a kind of public duty, which he owes to the Nigerian people, to expose, reconstruct, and negate the actualities of environmental degradation in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The author argues that since Ojaide's poetry intersects with the reali- ties of ecological imperialism, it is thus a dependable barometer to gauge the Nigerian environ- mental/ecological experience.

Dionne Brand and Alanis Obomsawin: polyphony in the poetics of resistance

Activist artists Dionne Brand and Alanis Obomsawin have much in common in their poetics of resistance. Brand's writings and documentaries explore issues of displacement, race, gender, and colonialism, revealing a constant determination in giving voice to what was silenced or marginalized by the dominant culture. Similarly, Obomsawin's documentaries show a long commitment to the history of aboriginal people, reclaiming their sovereignty of voice. Making use of polyphony, these two artists contest hegemonic discourses and a nationalist aesthetic that either ignores or appropriates difference. This study discusses the implications of polyphony in Brand's poetry and two documentaries, Sisters in the Struggle and Long Time Comin', and in Obomsawin's documentaries, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance and Rocks at Whiskey Trench. All evidences demonstrate fine specimens of applied poetics, faithful to their ethics of resistance.

The Integration of Western Modernism in Postcolonial Arabic Literature: a study of Abdul-Wahhab Al-Bayati's Third World poetics

Undermining the narrow critical approaches which neglect the potential intersection between modernism and postcolonialism, this paper explores the attempt by contemporary Arab poets to engage Western modernist heritage in order to articulate domestic narratives integral to the geopolitics of the Arab region in the postcolonial era. In an attempt to redefine tradition and deviate from fossilised inherited legacies and tyrannical regimes, postcolonial Arab writers, led by the Iraqi poet, Abdul-Wahhab Al-Bayati, pursue solace and redemption inWwestern modernism, developing Western forms into a poetics of resistance and protest. Through textual apprenticeship, assimilated from Western literature and culture, they combine modernism and postcolonialism into a nexus incorporating Western techniques while emphasising variants and displacements between their nationalist perspective and that of their Western forebears. Convinced of the role played by the West in the shaping of modern Arabic cultural traditions, Al-Bayati reconstructs colonial modernism as a narrative of liberation, engaging in dialogues with Western pioneering writers and masterpieces. Transforming Western modernist strategies into a revolutionary construct, Al-Bayati aims to challenge internal oppression and external hegemony. Through tran-cultural entanglement and textual appropriation of Western narratives he provides diversity and insight into postcolonial Arabic poetry, intensifying the awareness of other traditions and reconstructing his own heritage.

Poetics and Doxology: Von Balthasar on Poetic Resistance to Modernity's Turn to the Subject

Poetics and Doxology: Von Balthasar on Poetic Resistance to Modernity's Turn to the Subject

(Re)writing the black feminist text:

ABSTRACT From Homer's Odyssey to the Arabic folk tale Leila and Majnun, the work of Achmat Dangor repeatedly revises texts from diverse literary traditions. Perhaps the most outstanding but overlooked aspect of Dangor's revisionism is his refiguration of Zora Neale Hurston's Their eyes were watching god into the township novella The Z Town trilogy. At first glance, this appears to place Dangor firmly within the Black Consciousness tradition of invoking Afro-American protest literature as a form of poetic resistance to apartheid. However, in keeping with Henry Louis Gates Jr's theory of signification, Dangor's mimesis is as much an act of criticism as it is one of solidarity. Rather than rewriting a text produced and subsequently canonised by a black male minority that, although oppressed themselves, actively participated in the oppression of their female counterparts, Dangor chooses to rewrite a seminal text of black feminism only recently accepted into the Afro-American literary canon. It is argued here that, in doing so, Dangor not only participates in the critical reappraisal of the black canon initiated by female Afro-American authors such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, but effectively calls for an analogous re-evaluation of black literature in South Africa.

Postcolonial Poetry in Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique: Some Contemporary Considerations

Postcolonial Poetry in Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique: Some Contemporary Considerations Carmen Lúcia Tindó Secco Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro trans. by Russell G. Hamilton Focusing on Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique, we intend to reflect on the space occupied by postcolonial poetry in those lusophone African countries. We have in view the contemporary disenchantment resulting from a sense of social dystopias. On the basis of our understanding of the latter, our intention is to investigate whether or not the Cape Verdean, Angolan, and Mozambican works of poetry to be analyzed are instituted as "revolutionary sites" that affirm themselves as literary products of political and aesthetic compromise. In the final analysis, we wish to verify whether, although fragmented, present-day poetic consciousness, expressed in these literatures, is offered up as "spaces of new memories." In the aftermath of independence euphoria, at the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s, in their works the new generations of Cape Verdean writers begin to denounce the archipelago's cultural void and verify that political liberation has not ended poverty and hunger. What is delineated is a strong sense of disappointment as relates to the "combatant-celebrative" values that inspired so much of independence poetics. Postindependence euphoria poetry no longer celebrates only collective social patriotism, it also has proceeded to operate with individualist feelings within the context of the existential and universal. What has emerged is a new lyricism, replete with metapoetic constructions that rethink social paths as well as those of poetry itself. Mirabilis de Veias ao Sol (Mirabilis Foliage in the Sun, which also can be freely translated as Admirable Trends in the Sun), is an anthology, organized by José Luís Hopffer Almada and published in 1991, that brings together works by the Novíssimos Poetas de Cabo Verde (Cape Verde's Most Recent Poets), this being the volume's subtitle, and divulges a lyric output of the period of the post-25th of April (this being, of course, the date, in 1974, on which the Portuguese fascist dictatorship was overthrown). The unfulfilled promises of social justice after political independence have generated a sense of deception on the part of some. Nevertheless, recalling that even in the desert there grows a plant called mirabilis, the mirabilia generation, i.e, the "admirable generation," emerges and offers itself as poetic resistance to those preceding years of what some think of as "bad literary times." In the anthology's introduction Hopffer Almada defines these youngest poets' [End Page 119] profession of faith. Their works, as a whole, undertake to be a profound reflection on the Cape Verde present: Fustigada pelos ventos (da incompreensão!), pelo sol (da hipocrisia!), pelos tempos vários do mau tempo literário, desse tempo querendo-se vegetação literária. No deserto, cresce a geração mirabílica, feita signo na margem desértica do mar. De velas ao sol. As veias da indagação. As veias alagadas da terra das estradas, da poeira do dia-a-dia, do masapé dos campos do lixo dos caminhos suburbanos, do desespero recoberto de moscas, baratas e outros vermes. As veias loucas do mar, do marítimo lirismo dos dias afogados nos ciúmes dos montes. As veias, veias de vida, de morte, de desespero, das quatro estações místicas do que se medita no refúgio do silêncio. Veias docamponês e da enxada neste coito de séculos com a terra. Ao sol, hipócrita por entre a bruma e os cerros. Sol, signo de luz. Sol que ilumina. Sol que queima e ofusca o caminhar. Sol dependurado da perseverança secular. Mirabilis de veias ao sol. Geração mirabílica indagando o sol. "No Deserto cresce a Mirabilis". Diz o poeta Orlando Rodrigues. "Embora de veias ao sol". Adita Rodrigues de Sousa, para que das imagens do deserto cresçam as palavras da nossa geração...

Poetic Resistance: Juxtaposing Personal and Professional Discursive Constructions in a Practice Context

Poetic Resistance: Juxtaposing Personal and Professional Discursive Constructions in a Practice Context

McKeown, Andrew & Charles Holdefer, eds., Philip Larkin and the Poetics of Resistance

McKeown, Andrew & Charles Holdefer, eds., Philip Larkin and the Poetics of Resistance

The Poetics of Resistance: A reading of native American and Palestinian Intifada poetry

This paper critically examines social, historical and human zones of contact between contemporary native American poets and the Arab/Palestinian Intifada poets in order to illuminate issues of common interest that characterize the poetic discourse of both sides. Exploring political and textual spaces in these two poetic traditions, the paper illustrates the attitude toward native land, identity, struggle and other motifs that penetrate the poetic narrative of Palestinian and Native American poets..

:Poetic Resistance: English Women Writers and the Early Modern Lyric

Poetic resistance - laying hands on the harp despised creatures - the illusion of maternal self-effacement in 17th-century child loss poetry Anna Trapnel as holy poet and lyrical preacher Penelope, prophet, or poet? strategic self-figurations in Katherine Austen's Book M conclusion - the harp in hand.

The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry (review)

200 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) Austen attempts to counteract the cultural stereotype of the voracious and threatening widow in order to preserve her social rank and personal autonomy. Like Carey and Trapnel, Austen purposely denies her agency and figures herself as helpless in order to forge a permissible poetic voice with which to defend and enhance her position as a woman without a male protector. Most interesting about the analysis of ‘Book M’, however, is Hammons’s focus upon the interplay between gender and social class, and, specifically, upon Austen’s poem ‘On the Situation of Highbury’, ascribed here to the country house poem tradition. Examining the poem alongside country house poems by Jonson, Carew, and Lanyer, Hammons considers its departures from generic convention as specific to Austen’s self-presentation as a virtuous but independently wealthy widow. As a female poet, her relationship with the estate defied convention on numerous levels. Reading the poem as a social and literary negotiation of this relationship, Hammons suggests the complexity of Austen’s position as an independent widow authoring the worthiness of an estate which she hoped to own. In resisting cultural and religious stereotypes of what constituted acceptable behaviour for a woman, Austen, like Carey and Trapnel, appropriated the essentially male traditions of lyric poetry and reworked them from a feminine perspective. Though this study is valuable simply because it brings to light additional texts relevant to the study of Early Modern women writers, it also examines complex relationships between the social role of the writer and the text as vehicle for cultural comment and change. Poetic Resistance will appeal, therefore , not only to scholars of Early Modern women’s writing, but also to anyone interested in the intersection between social and literary culture, and in the strategic self-presentation of poets during this turbulent period of English history. Alison V. Scott English Department Macquarie University Harbus, Antonina, The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry (Costerus New Series 143), Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi, 2002; paper; pp. ix, 220; RRP US$54.00, EUR45.00; ISBN 9042008148. Old English studies have changed over the last few decades from a mainly philological perspective to a more subtle understanding of the complexity of Reviews 201 Parergon 20.2 (2003) the society which produced such a comparatively large extant corpus. Adding to an awareness of the sophistication of the Anglo-Saxon writers, and of their uniqueness, is the new volume by Antonina Harbus which draws attention to the way Old English poetry emphasised and privileged the life of the mind. This is an important work and complements the increased interest over the last decade in how earlier cultures viewed memory, mind and psyche. Harbus claims two aims to her book: ‘to investigate the emphasis on the mind in the poetic traditions of Anglo-Saxon England, and to outline the model of the mind on which this poetic discourse was structured’ (p. 13). The first claim is fully realised as she convincingly shows how the poets repeatedly used words associated with the mind (mod, gemynd, hyge, sefa, breostsefa etc). In the hagiographical tradition, where Latin and European counterparts exist, Harbus identifies how the Old English texts added references to mind and thought which were not present in the original. The identification of this uniqueness of perception of the mind as the locus of personality and action will surely stimulate more research into the comparative European traditions of mind. The second aim of the book is ambitious; the paucity of the material, and the medieval refusal to classify terminology in a manner appropriate to the twenty-first century, must inevitably lead to some speculation rather than a definitive taxonomy of psychological terms. Nevertheless, Harbus draws together evidence to show that the Anglo-Saxon writers described the mind as ‘an entity participating in the control of the self in a bipartisan manner. This dual and inherently fraught basis of agency, individual identity and consciousness is presented as a dynamic shaper of personal development’ (p. 186). Emotions occur in the mind, and the mind is also ‘the chief mechanism of an individual’s commerce with the divine’ (p. 187). Importantly, Harbus eschews the simplistic definition of...

Poetic Resistance: English Women Writers and the Early Modern Lyric (review)

Poetic Resistance: English Women Writers and the Early Modern Lyric (review)

Representing the Poetics of Resistance in Transnational South Asian Women's Fiction and Film

Representing the Poetics of Resistance in Transnational South Asian Women's Fiction and Film

"Progressive Lit.": Amiri Baraka, Bruce Andrews, and the Politics of the Lyric "I"

Bruce Andrews's poetry and criticism have done much to establish assumptions about dissent that became standard for readers of Language poetry during seventies and eighties. For many readers, Andrews's position made oppositional poetry in tradition of Whitman impossible to believe in: Beat poetry, (1) for example, seemed politically unselfconscious. Andrews assumes that lyric poet's freedom to dissent is only freedom to say yes to American ideology--individualism. (2) Calling poems that fail to explode lyric I--in other words, false dissent--progressive lit., Andrews tries to establish a consensus that exploding lyric I is only true dissent possible in poetry. (3) However, Amiri Baraka's poetry shows that Andrews's position is reductive and brittle. Baraka's lyric I is always already exploding, reinventing social and historical within individual and collective lyric. Corrosively and with persistent monochromatic anger, Andrews's Gestalt Me Out! substitutes a particular kind of paratactic irony for lyric I. However, in sacrificing (certain modes of) representation, narrative, and expression, Andrews may unintentionally throw out political we along with lyric I: That's way you spell it, dear, it's way you look it up, arouse beat, saccharine zip-a-tone ... wake knees of normals? (Romanticism 97). Andrews's pastiche is neither a parody of mainstream culture and values nor a parody of Beat (individualist) nonconformity-as-opposition (arouse beat ... wake knees of normals?). Instead, Gestalt Me Out! performs symptoms, acts out poet's inability to transform alienation into prophecy (that's way you spell it, dear ...). Andrews tries to develop a mode of opposition, a poetics of resistance, more genuine than what most readers still think of as political poetry. Andrews's stance toward opposition and resistance depends on his assumption that progressive lit. (Praxis 23) is naive--and is always coopted into ideology of American freedom. Gestalt Me Out! slaps repeatedly at sort of themes and narrative trajectories readers expect to find in confessional lyric. Andrews's tone oscillates and wobbles, connecting camp, schizophrenia, and outrage: His mode is a cyberpunk version of what Fredric Jameson called the hysterical sublime as schizophrenia--psychological liminality without reintegration). Andrews politicizes surface of his poem in order to embody individualism, representative democracy, and representation as inextricable, as a single sinking ship: Sometimes you just get tired of sucking same dick all time. never break a mirror. Religion=chucksteak; quits its sap. All elderly feel parental. (Romanticism 97) Andrews's staccato concatenation empties potential plots, one after another, of lyric force, and these unstable micro-narratives obviously are not believed way fictions animating Out of Cradle Endlessly Rocking or Kaddish are believed. Through tropes, allusions, and routines (as in stand-up comedy), Andrews calls attention to problems that bedevil subjectivity and identity. For example, ego quits its sap is a thumbnail parody of vital continuum--a language rather than a single analogy--among self, body, and nature--a continuum central to Emerson and Whitman and countless gorgeous (and valid) poems. I'd never break a hints at magical thinking and (proposed) connection between magic and schizophrenia in a faux-naif voice. trope recalls fragility of self in Marvell's The Mower's Song-- My mind was once true survey Of all these meadows fresh and gay And in greenness of grass Did see its hopes as in a glass (109) --or catastrophic/gothic recognition in Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott (the mirror crack'd from to side [24]). …