I am inviting abstracts for the Northeast MLA conference to be held in Boson from March 7-10, 2024. 

In the discourse of South Asian Literature, the genre of poetry is something like a surplus. Poets have contributed heavily to South Asian Literature: Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the aesthetics of resistance, Agha Shahid Ali and the form of Ghazal, and Eunice De Souza and confessional poetry. Postcolonial South Asian studies are waiting to read poetry isolated from other genres of literature—poetry for its poetics. We envision this panel to ask how poetry from South Asia and its diaspora might be studied differently from other genres like novels, narratives, and non-fiction. How might a postcolonial lens be differently applied to the genre of poetry? For instance, critics like Elleke Boehmer use the term “juxtaposition” to study how Postcolonial Poetics "demands of the reader a constant bridging across [...] which correlates also with the characteristic postcolonial processes of migration and translation, carries particular imaginative as well as ethical force.” The South Asian poetry community now seems to be regaining strength among the masses, especially with the advent of the digital age. Especially in the age of political unrest, with the resurfacing of poetry in public spaces—sites of protest and social media circulation, how might we read and potentially theorize South Asian poetics? This panel invites papers on poets of South Asian heritage who might be interested in form, rhythm, lyric, aesthetics, history, culture, affect of poetry, etc. We hope to read abstracts on projects both in English and in translation.

Please submit your abstract using the NeMLA portal (approx. 250 words):https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20555 

Last date for submissions: September 30, 2023