The poetics of nationalism: Cultural resistance and poetry in East Pakistan/Bangladesh, 1952–71

Ahmed, Nizam

doi:10.1080/17449855.2012.695745

Cited by 19 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…But with the global shift in power from Asia to Europe (Plys, 2013), Islamicate poetry became associated instead with political resistance against the state. Resistance poetry played a role in national independence movements, for example in Bangladesh (Ahmed 2014), Algeria (Chaker, 1989;Hornedo, 2012), Tunisia (Khayati, 1989), the Sahara (Pico´n et al, 2015), Iraq (Jones, 2014), Somalia (Hassan et al, 1995), Zanzibar (Mulokozi, 1975), and Mozambique (Searle, 1982); in anti-colonial resistance movements, especially in Palestine (Alshaer, 2009;Ashrawi, 1978;Canova, 1971;Elmessiri, 1981;Maira and Shihade, 2012;Sulaiman, 1984) and Kashmir (Ali, 2012;Kak, 2013;Kaul, 2017); and in postcolonial movements to restore democracy, for example in Nigeria (Oku`noye`, 2011) and Uzbekistan (Kendizior, 2007). In the context of these anti-state movements, poetry was employed to build solidarity within anti-authoritarian resistance movements by making it known that a sentiment of opposition against the state was widespread and growing.…”

Section: Islamicate Resistance Poetry Across the Globementioning

confidence: 99%

The Poetry of Resistance: Poetry as Solidarity in Postcolonial Anti-Authoritarian Movements in Islamicate South Asia

Plys

2020

Theory, Culture & Society

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During India’s Emergency, anti-state poetry of a decidedly amateurish quality proliferated. Anti-Emergency poetry did little to bring about the restoration of democracy, nor could it have reasonably been mistaken for great art. So what was the purpose of writing resistance poetry if it was not meant to directly influence politics nor to be great art? Poetry as politics has a long history in the Islamicate world, dating back to the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula. While until the 19th century Islamicate poetry was tied to the Caliphates who employed poets to extol the virtues of the ruling classes, after the so-called ‘Rise of the West’ Islamicate poetry became associated instead with anti-colonial and anti-state movements across the Islamicate world from Morocco to Indonesia and from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. In this essay, I argue that the utility of resistance poetry in anti-state movements in South Asia has been to build solidarity among social movement participants. The sociology of social movements has long placed emphasis on the role of affective bonds and solidarity building for predicting social movement success, and poetry, in the Islamicate context especially, I argue, does exactly that. By circulating poems, social movement participants inform the reader that resistance and opposition exist, they inspire participants and would-be participants and calm fears that participants might have, especially in moments of political repression. These poems generate emotional and cultural bonds among social movement participants by linking anti-state movements to the centuries-old tradition of Islamicate poetry, thereby fostering solidarity and providing a firm basis for collective action.

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Section: Islamicate Resistance Poetry Across the Globementioning

confidence: 99%

The Poetry of Resistance: Poetry as Solidarity in Postcolonial Anti-Authoritarian Movements in Islamicate South Asia

Plys

2020

Theory, Culture & Society

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“…The Bengali nationalism that emerged in the course of the 1950s found its point of origin in the language movement of 1952, in which students protested and died to resist Urdu as the only state language of Pakistan. The Bengali language galvanized the political resistance in East Pakistan, with Bengali cultural forms providing a crucial affective pull for the movement for independence (Ahmed, 2012). Today Bangladeshi nationalism simply sets apart “us” and “them” through the marker of Bengali.…”

Section: Nationalist Film Historiography and The Leaky Archivementioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-wing Filmmaking: East Pakistani Urdu Films and Their Traces in the Bangladesh Film Archive

Hoek

2014

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

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This article excavates Urdu cinema from East Pakistan from the Bangladesh Film Archive. Neglected within the scholarship on Bangladeshi cinema history, I ask what shape the forgetting of East Pakistani Urdu films, and the worlds in which they were made and seen, has taken. I will suggest that the political watershed of 1971 limits the possibilities for excavating the past of Bangladeshi and Pakistani cinema and produces deeply personal forms of forgetting of this particular cinema. I will show how, contrary to accepted film historiography, the cinema of East and West Pakistan was deeply connected, that there was a Bengali reading audience for Urdu films and that Bengali filmmakers in East Pakistan debated the question of Urdu cinema. I use the film Son of Pakistan to suggest that the peculiar opacities around this film direct us to pay attention to those fragments of visual culture that refer not just to a disappeared past but an actively forgotten world of everyday pleasures and aspirations.

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“…Emerging out of the Liberation War, the struggle for independence and colonial registers (Ahmed 2012;Mookherjee 2011;Pinney 2004), the image of spilled blood has become publically available for the articulation of political claims and analyses. The imagery of violently spilled blood gives force to political claims by different groups and parties through its vibrant and bodily presence, instantiating struggle, injustice, sacrifice and resistance.…”

Section: Ek Shagor Rokter Binimoyementioning

confidence: 99%

Blood splattered Bengal: The spectacular spurting blood of the Bangladeshi cinema

Hoek

2013

Contemporary South Asia

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The contemporary Bangladeshi cinema is stained red by the enthusiastic use of fake blood that erupts from bodies pictured in fist fights, gun battles and sword attacks. In this article, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork in the Bangladesh film industry to illustrate the spurting of fake blood in two popular film genres: mainstream action cinema and straight-to-VCD rural crime stories (kiccha pala VCDs). I suggest that the affective intensity ascribed to blood by film insiders points to the capacity of blood to lend force to the protean and submerged discourses of contemporary Bangladesh presented in these blood-splattered genres. These film forms make use of the excessive and abject quality inherent in this bodily tissue as well as interacting with more regimented and metaphoric uses of blood in the political aesthetics of contemporary Bangladesh that they recycle and pervert. IntroductionThe make-up men of the Bangladeshi action film Mintu the Murderer (pseud. 2005) had been at work for some time before the decapitation shot. Mixing together Rooh Afza, a bright red drinking syrup favoured by children, with a pigment known in the market as khuni lal (murderer's red), they had filled up a large plastic bottle with fake blood. They handed it to the stunt men who were setting up the decapitation shot. One of their members lay down on the floor of a banged-up Toyota, hiding from the camera's eye trained on the passenger door. The stuntman carried two props: in one hand he had a papier-mâché head, complete with curly black hair and glasses, and in the other he held the bottle of blood. The camera would take two brief shots. 'Rolling', called the stunt director to the cameraman, who rolled the celluloid in his old Arriflex camera. Upon hearing action, the stuntman in the car threw the head out of the window. 'Cut!' The second part would be harder. When action was called again, the stuntman in the car carefully lifted the bottle to the edge of the open window and then squeezed as hard as he could. A huge jet of bright red fake blood came spurting out of the window. When edited together with the footage of the film's gangster swinging a large blade at the minister sticking his head out of the car window, these two brief shots would present the decapitation in one powerful crimson montage.

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The poetics of nationalism: Cultural resistance and poetry in East Pakistan/Bangladesh, 1952–71

Cited by 19 publications

References 10 publications

The Poetry of Resistance: Poetry as Solidarity in Postcolonial Anti-Authoritarian Movements in Islamicate South Asia

The Poetry of Resistance: Poetry as Solidarity in Postcolonial Anti-Authoritarian Movements in Islamicate South Asia

Cross-wing Filmmaking: East Pakistani Urdu Films and Their Traces in the Bangladesh Film Archive

Blood splattered Bengal: The spectacular spurting blood of the Bangladeshi cinema

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