The session is inspired by two recent critical shifts, the first from the field of English poetry, the second from Area Studies. Following recent scholarship on poetry in English, including Jason David Hall’s Meter Matters (2011), Meredith Martin’s The Rise and Fall of Meter (2012), and Ben Glaser’s Modernism’s Metronome (2020), panelists return to the long-neglected realm of metrical form as a key site of meaning-making in contexts of anti-colonial and anti-racist political protest. Following recent scholarship in Area Studies, on the other hand, these papers also interrogate the political utility and affective impact of experimental poetic forms such as “free verse” or the “prose poem,” in Arabic, and the subjunctive mood and narrative fracturing of “critical fabulation” in African-American literary production. Robyn Creswell’s City of Beginnings (2019), Kevin Jones’ The Dangers of Poetry (2020) and Huda J. Fakhreddine’s The Arabic Prose Poem (2021), all challenge and nuance the conventional narrative of modernist “development” in Arabic poetry, just as Evie Shockley’s Renegade Poetics (2011) reconsidered the archive of the Black Arts Movement in terms of debates around experimental versus traditional literary and artistic forms.
The panel joins Palestinian, Latin American, and African-American poetries not only on the basis of shared thematic concerns with resistance against oppressive colonial and racial regimes, but also on the basis of form—how forms deemed “classical” can serve subversive purposes, and how languages deemed “simple” or “nonstandard” can open new horizons of community and solidarity.
Ahmad Diab will start the panel at its chronological beginning with “Palestinian Protest Poetry During the British Mandate (1920-1948).” Diab underscores the important role poets played in shaping the national debate on liberation in this understudied period, and he illustrates how they used a variety of registers and poetic styles—ranging from the colloquial to the neoclassical to the “proto-modernist”—to create a heterogeneous language of protest that prefigured the later discourse of Arab nationalism.
Continuing in the vein of Palestinian poetry, but expanding outward into a global Third-World frame, Maru Pabón’s paper “Historicizing Simplicity: Between Muqawama and Coloquialismo” revisits the work of Mahmoud Darwish in the light of the Third-Worldist emphasis on the “voice” or “language of the people” developed following the 1955 Bandung Conference. Not only were different fantasies of popular language animated as the precondition for transforming poetry into a weapon in this context, but the newly perceived importance of voices from oppressed elsewheres generated a conception of poetry tasked with discursively linking disparate struggles. Far from understanding the “simple” diction and forms of the poems in Darwish’s 1964 collection Awraq al-Zaytun (Olive Leaves) as natural expressions of the “voice” of the people, Pabón sees them as ideological negotiations that index the Third-Worldist networks of literary exchange—especially with Latin America—in which Darwish was embedded.
Finally, moving both northward in space and forward in time, Olivia Milroy Evans’ paper, “Persona Poems and Political Portraiture in Contemporary African-American Art,” examines how contemporary African-American poets have revived the classical genre of the persona poem or dramatic monologue (from the Latin persona, “mask”) as way of imaginatively engaging with history when there are gaps or omissions in an archive. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation,” Evans reads recent collections such as Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2006), Tyehimba Jess’s Olio (2016), Eve Ewing’s 1919 (2019), and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis (2020), placing the renewed popularity of the persona poem in conversation with the resurgence of political portraiture in Black art, thereby raising key formal and ethical questions about power, voice, and resistance.
Moving through several languages, locations, and historical periods, the papers share a commitment to thinking about poetic form as more than mere scaffolding for thematic meaning. For poets in Mandate Palestine, post-Bandung Latin America, and the contemporary United States, any form that served the message of resistance—however classical or dusty—was worth reviving and repurposing.