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Judith Rauscher (Bamberg):
"The Place-Conscious Poetics of Agha Shahid Ali"
Abstract
Little considered by scholars in the past, the work of Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949 - 2001) now begins to receive increasing critical attention. Ali’s poems are preoccupied with issues of cultural conflict and contact, constantly interweaving western and eastern cultural traditions and crossing borders in an attempt to write multiple cultural memories and histories. So far, Ali’s poems have been mainly read in the postcolonial context. Recently they have been classified as prime examples of a transnational (American) poetics (cf. Ramazani 2006), which is to say as texts symptomatic of the postmodern condition of ‘deterritorialization,’ at term which – after originating with Deleuze and Guattari in the 1970s and upon having traveled through various academic disciplines (cf. Giddens 1990, Appadurai 1996, Hardt & Negri 2000, Pease 2009) – now often describes ‘the weakening ties of culture to place in times of globalization and migration’ in very general terms.
Arguing against a reading of Ali’s work as one of displacement in the sense of ‘placelessness,’ I propose that his poems, in particular those from the collection A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991), are in fact very much ‘emplaced.’ They are concerned with and draw on the physical reality of very concrete places, putting forward what I call a ‘place-conscious nomadic poetics.’ Approaching his texts from an ecocritical perspective, I will outline how Ali’s poetry can be read as a challenge to those strands of contemporary literary criticism dealing with ‘literatures of migration’ which over-emphasize (and overvalue) issues of displacement over those of emplacement, and which consider place as a mere container or background of cultural phenomena. On another level, I hope to show that Ali’s poetry allows a critique of those theories of the postmodern which consider concepts such as ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘(re)territorialization’ only in the abstract, ignoring the new materialist basis of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy.
Arguing against a reading of Ali’s work as one of displacement in the sense of ‘placelessness,’ I propose that his poems, in particular those from the collection A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991), are in fact very much ‘emplaced.’ They are concerned with and draw on the physical reality of very concrete places, putting forward what I call a ‘place-conscious nomadic poetics.’ Approaching his texts from an ecocritical perspective, I will outline how Ali’s poetry can be read as a challenge to those strands of contemporary literary criticism dealing with ‘literatures of migration’ which over-emphasize (and overvalue) issues of displacement over those of emplacement, and which consider place as a mere container or background of cultural phenomena. On another level, I hope to show that Ali’s poetry allows a critique of those theories of the postmodern which consider concepts such as ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘(re)territorialization’ only in the abstract, ignoring the new materialist basis of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy.
Bio
I am a first year doctoral student and lecturer of American Studies at the University of Bamberg, where I am currently writing my Ph.D. thesis on ‘Place and Displacement in Contemporary Transnational American Poetry.’ I did my undergraduate work in English and French literature at the University of Bamberg and then spent two years studying literature and literary theory at Dartmouth College in the United States, where I completed an M.A. in Comparative Literature in 2010. Before beginning my Ph.D. thesis research and starting to teach American literature during the summer term of 2012, I finished a second M.A. degree in Anglistik/Amerikanistik at the University of Bamberg. My research interests include 19th and 20th century poetry, migrant/ethnic/transnational American literatures, ecocriticism, queer studies and literary theory in general.