Writing War, and the Politics of Poetic Conversation

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Main author: Caron, James
Other authors: Khan, Salman
Format: Journal Article           
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id eprints-36228
recordtype eprints
institution SOAS, University of London
collection SOAS Research Online
language English
language_search English
topic BH Aesthetics
BJ Ethics
DS Asia
GN Anthropology
HM Sociology
JC Political theory
PK Indo-Iranian languages and literatures
description This article’s premise is that war is ontological devastation, and that this opens up questions as to how to write about it. It contends that even critiques of war, whether critical-geopolitical analyses of global structures or ethnographies of the everyday, center war in ways that underscore erasures of non-war life, and therefore risk participating in that same ontological devastation. Engagement with extra-academic conversational worlds, both their social lives and their intellectual ones, is ethically necessary in writing war. To that end, this article examines poetic production from one front in the US-led “Global War on Terror”: Swat Valley, Pakistan. Poets in Swat have produced an analysis of war as ontological devastation, but also protest against their reduction to the violence-stricken present, in the minds of others and themselves. This intervention is not intellectual critique alone. Focusing on a new genre of “resistance” poetry, this article shows how poets resist war by maintaining worlds partly beyond it. In this, the critical content and the social lives of poetry are inseparable.
format Journal Article
author Caron, James
author_facet Caron, James
Khan, Salman
authorStr Caron, James
author_letter Caron, James
author2 Khan, Salman
author2Str Khan, Salman
title Writing War, and the Politics of Poetic Conversation
publisher Taylor and Francis
publishDate 2022
url https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/36228/

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