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Priyam Goswami Choudhury

Doctoral Fellow

 

Campus am Neuen Palais
Am Neuen Palais 10
Building 1, Room 0.15
14469 Potsdam
Germany

 

consulting hours
Consulting hours:
Tuesday
14:00-15:30

Dissertation Project

Hybrid Cross-pollinations: Re-reading Indian English Poetry as Networks of Publishing

In my project, I study post-Independence English poetry in India through Little Magazines and journals. I want to review and revise the way in which we consider the formative history of a cultural industry; in this case, Indian poetry in English. My research takes place through the study of publication histories of poets and how those “collectives" embraced a changing aesthetic in the postcolonial nation-state. It ties these narratives into a material history of poetry publication. In terms of cultural research, this project will go into the material trail of the publication of poetry as a cultural practice that is derived from networks of poets at work. A good part of this, for instance, would follow the publication history of individual poems through hybrid networks of editors and poets.

I would posit that since my project exists based on materialities of culture that has been produced through exchanges (medially or otherwise), the research question that I am delving into requires an approach that investigates these nuances. In bringing these questions to the fore, I see my own work complementing the research area of an alternative genealogy of Indian poetry. In creating a genealogy through the history of collectives and networks of poets, we take account of culture as something that is produced in doing and in being reflexive about the role of interpretation and translation in the case of a postcolonial body. The body of the text – both a literal body that is to be situated in culture and the poetic text – is, hence, to be seen as an irreducible object in the framework; its incommensurability not to be assimilated into an all-consuming ideological line of thought but brought forth as a fruit of crosspollinating practices.  


Biography

I completed my bachelors at the University of Delhi in 2014 where I had spent three years reading - among other things - postcolonial writers, European modernists, postwar European writers and 16th-18th century English writing. Following that, I spent three years at Freie Universität between 2015-18 where I started working on postcolonial Indian poetry for my Masters thesis while drinking a lot of coffee and Mate Mate. And in 2019, I joined the Research Training Group to research publishing networks of poetry.


Research Interests

  • Postcolonialism
  • Indian poetry
  • Popular culture
  • Cultural Theory

Conference Papers

"A Half-Caste Othello: The Poetics of Adapting Shakespeare in India" in Minor Shakespeares, University of Split, 23-24 September 2016.

"Manto’s Necropolis: Constructing Violent Partition Histories through Violated Bodies" in LOVE AND TERROR: Feminisms in Transnational Perspectives, Inter-University Centre Dubrovnik, 22-26 May 2017.

“A missed land: Producing the Postcolonial Nation in Agha Shahid Ali’s Poetry” in REPRESENTATIONS OF HOME, Conflict and/or (Be)longing: Thinking with Stories and Images, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, 16-17 November 2017.

"Configuring the ‘World’ in ‘World Literature’: A Case Study of Arundhati Roy’s Reception in Berlin" in “World Literature Conference – Postcolonial Perspectives”, University of Delhi, 15-17 March 2018.

"The Work of Art in the Era of Legitimization: “Miyah Poetry” in the Context of Contemporary Indian Politics" in Revolutions in Reading, Stockholm University, 21-23 June 2021

Modernities in the Contact Zone: Translating across Unfamiliar Objects, GAPS Postgraduate Conference (organizer), Universität Potsdam, 21-23 October 2021

Postcolonial Interdisciplinary Colloquium in Literary and Cultural Studies (organizer), University of Pretoria/Universität Potsdam, 12-13 April 2022 


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