2. The Local Poem in a Global Age

Anticolonial poetics: forging solidarities and imagining futures

“…The poem, 'pressured and fractured by this convergence', can reveal to us 'at close hand' the contradictions, fusions and impositions of colonial modernity. 22 Because of its size, the poem offers 'a vehicle that affords rapid and radial imaginative movement', 23 spanning vast distances of time and space and rendering visible unobvious connections.…”

“…24 Time and space can be stretched within the frame of a poem, bringing distant places and distant times together through the elasticity of the poetic imagination: 'a poem can be literally sited in one place while figuratively stretched to another … poetry is a literary space that-irreducible to the empirical mapping of singular and self-contained places-miniaturizes, intensifies, and multiplies the entanglements between widely separated sites.' 25 Ramazani's insights into the features of poetry which lend themselves to the articulation of transnational connections are fundamental, but what is it about poetry which might lend itself to anticolonial expression? Histories of anticolonial struggle and the emergence of anticolonial expression suggest several answers.…”