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" Arts of the impossible: The transnational poetics of Etel Adnan, Agha Shahid Ali, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Kishwar Naheed "
Mahwash Shoaib
M. Alexander
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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54690
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| Doc. No
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TL24644
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| Call number
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3325397
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| Main Entry
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Mahwash Shoaib
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| Title & Author
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Arts of the impossible: The transnational poetics of Etel Adnan, Agha Shahid Ali, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Kishwar Naheed\ Mahwash Shoaib
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| College
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City University of New York
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| Date
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2008
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2008
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| Page No
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265
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| Abstract
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My dissertation debates whether in an ostensibly borderless world, poetry, as a cultural product, can counter the claims of capital and empire and deconstruct the borders around nations, languages, and bodies. American poets Etel Adnan, Agha Shahid Ali, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Pakistani poet Kishwar Naheed disseminate a poetics, alternately rooted in cosmopolitan or nation-based thinking, which translates these concerns within experimental and traditional permutations of the lyric. I propose that cross-pollination of multiple linguistic and literary traditions, heightened awareness of the national and cultural demarcations that bind and hold people apart, recognition of the embodied location of the poet in different locations, attention to local prosody and global rapport with other poets, and engagement with elements of textual production and reception are the distinct features of a transnational poetics. In analyzing representative works from Adnan, Ali, Cha, and Naheed, I contend that their lyrical recollections of fragmented memories about a conflict-ridden, divided, or imagined homeland help them create counter-historical palimpsests. They challenge paradigms of citizenship, modes of exilic and domesticated living, and nominalizations of genres and canons. Their poetics is shaped as much by an active confrontation of empire as by a dynamic negotiation of the demands of belonging, nation, desire, and aesthetics. An important discussion here is how translation becomes an apt metaphor for the transmission of the poet, the reader, and the text to unfamiliar realms across predetermined limits. Dwelling in multiple languages, these particular poets deal with the exigencies of gendered and racial codes in the various domains of contemporary American, Asian American, and Asian poetry. I argue that in imagining a lyrical space where the subject is rendered legible and historical trauma can be witnessed, their transnational poetics is borne out of the detritus of physical dislocations and formal dissonances. The struggle of these poets is to keep alive cultural memory and the past while the world around them is violently restructured by economic and political forces. Their lyrics are ways of imagining the impossible, which is the creation of a transnational imaginary–the composition of a community of poets and readers.
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Social sciences; Language, literature and linguistics; Adnan, Etel; Ali, Agha Shahid; Arab; Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung; East Asian; Experimental and formal poetry; India; Korea; Lebanon; Naheed, Kishwar; Poetics; Poetry; Sexuality; South Asian; Translation studies; Comparative literature; Womens studies; American literature; 0453:Womens studies; 0591:American literature; 0295:Comparative literature
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M. Alexander
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City University of New York
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