Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Using 9/11 American poetic responses as point of departure, this research explores the post-9/11 responses that are foregrounded in South Asian poetry. Employing the ideas of Dominick Lacapra’s “Reliving Trauma” and Marianne Hirsch’s “Post-memory” from Trauma and Memory Studies respectively together, this research examines the post-9/11 rhetoric to explore the aesthetic structures of reliving traumatic experiences that emerged as the aftermath of 9/11 in South Asia. To analyse the 9/11 rhetoric of American poetry and post-9/11 rhetoric of South Asian poetry, this research has selected poems from three anthologies: Poetry after 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, Poetry of the Taliban, The Veiled Suite and Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. After the postulation of post-9/11 rhetoric of the poems, this research addresses the issues that are commencing a counter narrative to what 9/11 American poets have exhibited in their poems. In doing so, it deciphers the poetic concerns connected to war on terror and post-9/11 chaos that exhibit the victims and perpetrators in American and South Asian poetry differently. The main argument of this research is that by aestheticizing the post-9/11 experiences, the South Asian poets have achieved an unprecedented resort of metaphor for victims and perpetrators in post-9/11 era.