2 - Dis/Orientations: Form and Freedoms in Decolonial Time

In this paper, I will develop a two-tiered approach: drawing first, from the post-independence poetry (1950s-1960s) of  Indian and Pakistani writers –  Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Amrita Pritam, and Subhash Mukhopadhyay, and reading them in dialogue with contemporary works of Afro-Caribbean thinkers like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. My goal will be three-fold: (i) To glean how ideas of freedom were articulated by these South Asian writers following the catastrophic arrival of political independence on the heels of a genocidal partition in the late-1940s; (ii) To put such ideas in dialogue with arguments being raised during processes of decolonization in the African continent in the 1950s-1960s; and (iii) To trace how political ruptures and transition found form in poetics, and how such poetics articulated thought in the time of 20th-century decolonization – a temporality shaped by both finding and losing place, by hope as much as disenchantment. My proposed title of ‘Dis/Orientations” is a gesture towards capturing this dialectical scope of poetics/politics. The paper is also a preliminary proposition of working with texts that are drawn transnationally; are often read as translations; and remain both connected and separate in their historical as well as creative contexts. As such, awareness of their resonances as much as dissonances poses a critical question for historians of transnational art, thought or histories: what are the concrete ways in which we can put transnational ideas in dialogue? What are the limits of such dialogues, and (how) must we transcend them?