The Politics and Poetics of “Fieldnotes”: Decolonizing Ethnographic Knowing

Abstract

In this article, I present insurgent poetry as a way to decolonize ethnographic knowing. I argue that insurgent poetry tethered to grassroots struggles represents a critical site for decolonizing relationships in activist ethnography. My activist ethnographic work takes place alongside, and in solidarity with Miya communities in Northeast India, who have been disenfranchised and face persecution and statelessness. Presenting poems that effervesced in relation to “fieldwork,” I theorize poetry as a decolonial enactment: a form of witnessing that resists a disciplining colonial gaze and creates possibilities for decolonial onto-epistemic rupture/reorientation; in doing so, allowing for radical relationality and reciprocal knowing.

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