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

Abstract

This article aims to unsettle the now accepted correlation of novel/nation within postcolonial studies by demonstrating that poetry can be a “national” form in societies with limited literacy such as East Pakistan/Bangladesh, due to its capacity for oral dissemination. Drawing my examples from the poetry and songs of the East Pakistani resistance to state oppression that eventually led to secession and the creation of Bangladesh, I argue that poetry is a powerful national form due to its capacity as a vehicle for the performance of collective expression (“nation-language”) and the ritualized remembrance of collective trauma. I then offer three examples of how this is undertaken, through the creation of a national sublime, the mobilization of patriarchal gender roles, and through self-reflexive poetic calls to action. In doing so, I suggest that examinations of genres other than fiction and languages/literatures beyond English can destabilize claims within postcolonial studies that are derived from anglophone cosmopolitan fiction.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.