Diasporic form: embodied practice in contemporary anglophone poetics of the South Asian diaspora

Diasporic Form: Embodied Practice in Contemporary Anglophone Poetics of the South Asian Diasporais a creative/critical hybrid thesis that explores the value of embodied practice as a critical lens and creative methodology in poetry of the South Asian diaspora. In the first part of Diasporic Form, I show how paying critical attention to embodied practice illuminates the interplay between poets’ intentional, extra-textual practices and their published text. I examine the way Bhanu Kapil uses performance and idiosyncratic rituals to metabolize intergenerational trauma and ongoing patriarchal and racist violence in her hybrid text of poetic prose Ban en Banlieue. I also trace how Kazim Ali’s practices of fasting and yoga—tied to varied spiritual traditions of South Asia—queer essentialist reductions of South Asian cultural practices and illuminate the political implications of his poetics of sound and duration. To conclude the critical portion of this thesis, I present an auto-theoretical Exepraxis that documents my creative embodied practice of three idiosyncratic rituals. I connect my practice to the creative textual methodology and formal attributes of my hybrid poetic manuscript, Unfurl the No(o/i)se, which concludes the thesis. I also employ embodied practice as a creative methodology through short "Embodied Interludes" interspersed between the critical chapters. These interludes emerged from performances and rituals that accompanied my critical studies, thereby underscoring the interplay between my embodied critical and creative practice.

Attending to the interplay between embodied practice and poetic text allows for more precise engagement with the question of what poetry can do off the page in South Asian diasporic cultures. While there are varied histories of South Asian migration across my focus regions—North America, the UK, and Aotearoa New Zealand—this thesis focuses on South Asian diasporic formation in the latter half of the 20^th century onward, specifically attending to the unique entanglements between experiencing effects of colonization in the ancestral homeland and responding to racialization in nation-states predicated on White supremacist logics. The critical and creative work in this thesis approaches these questions: What does embodied practice do for South Asian diasporic poets? How can poetic practice reckon with grief, intergenerational hauntings and ambient racism in diasporic place? How can the diasporic body transfigure cultural practices entangled with violent legacies while at the same time navigating places dominated by Whiteness? The embodied practice approach of this thesis expands conversations in the growing field of transnational Asian diasporic poetics to consider the role of poetry in redefining what it means to "belong."