PhD Ca ndidate in the Department of English Language & Literatures at the Universi ty of British Columbia
Spe aker Bio
Fiana K awane (she/her) is a PhD Candidate at the Department of English Language an d Literatures\, UBC\, and a Killam doctoral scholar. Her dissertation reads lyric poetry by South Asian diasporic writers publishing between the 1970s and 2000s to rethink concepts of ecology and narratives of mobility\, poli tics of language\, and poetics of imaginative geographies. Through her work \, she offers critical readings of transnational poetry within the context of settler-colonialisms\, new nationalisms\, and late modernity. Her broade r research interests focus on the conditions that produce and circulate glo bal anglophone poetry and its readings. She is a 2022-'23 Fellow with the U BC Centre for Migration Studies.
Abstract
What is so extraordinary about something as seemingly everyday as a fragment of cotton sari fabric? In the late-1950s\, unsettling the binaries of a colle ctor’s item versus mass-produced commodity\, the Calcutta Writers Workshop began publishing sari-bound poetry books for wider circulation of Anglophon e poetry from newly independent India. Individually hand-bound in bright sa ri fabric\, gold-embossed with motifs of trees and birds\, and carrying tit les in calligraphy\, each dust jacket notes the name of the binder as one T ulamiah Mohiuddin. The small press’ choice of a slow\, hand-operated letter press for printing its pages also continues to date. Despite limited resour ces\, the Calcutta Writers Workshop launched the first poetry collections o f transnational poets Agha Shahid Ali and Meena Alexander before they becam e celebrated poets in the U.S. Yet\, the press’ contribution in the cultiva tion of late-twentieth century lyric poetry as a modality of critique and l iterary experiment has been largely overlooked. The press’ eclectic aesthet ic\, both material and poetic\, then calls for an attention towards the poe tic economies of small presses and their role in constituting and disturbin g conceptions of the global. Focusing on glitch as a generative analytic th at unsettles the industrial transformation of the manual to the automatic\, I will read Ali and Alexander's sari-bound poetry books with the Calcutta Writers Workshop as a transnational literary tactic that disturbs diffusion ist assumptions of innovation under the sign of modernity.
Plea se RSVP for this in-person event below.
[gravityform id="109" title=" true" description="true"]
CATEGORIES:Featured Homepage,Featured News &\; Events LOCATION:C.K. Choi 351 GEO:49.267266;-123.257944 URL;VALUE=URI:https://migration.ubc.ca/events/event/in-person-grad-student- power-hour-fiana-kawane/ ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://migr.cms.arts.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/2023/03/Power-Hour-3.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 DTSTART:20230312T100000 TZNAME:PDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR