James A. Winn Graduate Fellow
About
"Toward a Third Poetry: Notes on the Intimacies of Poetry and Anticolonial Militancy across Argentina and Iran"
As a comparatist and literary translator, I delve into the intimacies of poetry and militancy, examining Argentine militant poetry of the 1960s and 70s alongside traditions of Persian militant poetics deployed as tools of anticolonial resistance. I present case studies of two combatant-poets—Juan Gelman (1930-2014) and Ahmad Shamlou (1925-2000)—signaling a departure from the typical transatlantic studies done on Argentina, and more broadly, Latin America, which often place the region in dialogue with Spain or Europe. This positioning of Iranian poets in poetic-political conversation with their contemporaries in Argentina constitutes the basis for the comparative aspect of my research, ultimately unveiling previously unexplored shared ground for anticolonial solidarities that particularize and complicate the claims made by world poetry. Regarding these transnational poetic networks, I ask: How did different militant-poets, like Iran’s Ahmad Shamlou or Argentina’s Juan Gelman, build fraternal solidarities across their specific national realities through poetry? How did Iranian and Argentine poets variously articulate their own countries’ positions toward and within Tricontinentalism and the greater Third World liberatory movement? And finally, how did their (re)construction of a Third World, understood as a political and cultural project rooted in antiimperialist internationalisms, relate to but also subvert the notion of “Third World” as a fixed geopolitical category?
Arianna Afsari is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature.
