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Demonstrates the centrality of thinking about time to decolonial poetry and poetics.
Revolutionary Poetics considers the role of politically engaged poetry during social revolutions and processes of decolonization. Javier Padilla argues that writers in Ireland, Central America, Africa, and the Caribbean sought to capture in their poetry the time of liberation—a moment conjoining the end of colonialism and imperialism and the dawn of a decolonized historical consciousness. The book thus analyzes key moments in the history of twentieth-century liberation movements through poetry and poetics, examining the work of W. B. Yeats, Ernesto Cardenal, Pedro Mir, René Depestre, and Roque Dalton alongside the decolonial theories of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Enrique Dussel. These poets reimagined and adapted modernist poetics of instantaneity in order to advance collective aims and bolster the prospects of liberation. While the poetics of temporal rupture can be traced back to earlier Anglo-European traditions, it is in peripheral regions that the revolutionary moment acquired not just aesthetic but also historical and political meaning.
"Revolutionary Poetics shows how politically committed poets have repurposed European modernist theories of epiphany, instantaneity, and now-time, so that modernist temporal alienation becomes decolonial temporal liberation. Holding together the aesthetic and political senses in which writers can be revolutionary, Padilla creates an original constellation of transnational figures and constitutes decolonial poetry as a field of inquiry. Padilla's treatment of the politics of time is both innovative and inspiring." — Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, author of Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature
Javier Padilla is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Colgate University. He is the author of the poetry collection Dodecadencias.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Decolonial Moment
1. Reading W. B. Yeats Between Modernity and Coloniality
2. Enrique Dussel, Pedro Mir, and the Poetics of Liberation
3. René Depestre, Kairos, and Time of the Tricontinental
4. The Decolonial Poet-Martyr
5. The Decolonial Instant in Ernesto Cardenal’s Documentary Poems
Coda: Citationality, Martyrdom, and Kairos in South Africa
Notes
Bibliography
Index