The Jigsaw of Dis-coloration: Anti-Caste Poetics and The Absent Color
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Abstract
The article is a critical review essay that contextualises, discusses, and theorises anti-caste poetics in the context of discussions on Dalit aesthetics and experience vis à vis postcolonialism and subaltern studies, foregrounding an English poetry collection by a/nil, aka, Anilkumar Payyappilly Vijayan titled The Absent Color (New Delhi: Navayana, 2023). I propose that a/nil’s poetry, in comparison to discussions on world literatures, demands a specific labor in reading; his writing produces an annihilation of a given sensibility in reading poetry. I suggest that his poetry works like an inverse jigsaw puzzle, offering an anti-caste critique of a varna-centered world which is in place. The Absent Color, I argue, un-colors this world of deceptions, using discoloration (like annihilation) as a conceptual framework, to critique the world colored by caste.
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