King's College London

In the early 1970s, a series of debates ignited among writers across the global south. Amidst new realities created by decolonization movements and the rapid break-up of European empires, poets became involved in heated arguments about how to write poems. These ‘craft wars’ were imbued with the language of political decolonization, but questions about which forms and techniques were ‘radical’, ‘conservative’, ‘anti-colonial’, 'neo-colonial’, ‘elite’, or ‘popular’ could not be decided on strictly political grounds. Focusing on these craft wars, our key research questions are:

1. What role do poems and poets play in decolonization?
2. What does it mean to decolonize poetry?
3. How do the temporalities of literary cultures interact with the more familiar temporalities of politics?

Our first step will be to produce more thorough and detailed accounts of two instances with which we are already familiar: conflagrations which were ignited first in the Caribbean and then in South Africa. Here, our aim is to move beyond the polemics in order to focus on the poems at the heart of both confrontations. We will need to excavate these poems from archives and examine them in granular detail, so as to understand how, or whether, the polemics were in fact tethered to specific poetic practices. We will also need to examine the internal dynamics and trace the histories of these moments of confrontation, considering the trajectories of the central figures, as well as preliminary skirmishes in the 1960s and early 1970s. Finally, we will need to determine whether these confrontations had significant consequences for poetic practice in each of these poetry communities.

While this strand of the research probes the extent to which the outward similarities of these two conflicts were underpinned by related tensions and problematics, the value and distinctiveness of the ‘craft war’ as the basis for comparison must depend on the breadth and depth of its analytical or explanatory reach. Measuring this reach requires a knowledge of twentieth-century literary cultures that exceeds our own expertise. As a second strand of the research, we will therefore convene a workshop involving scholars based in the UK, USA and Europe, whose research encompasses the histories of poetry in the Americas, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and Australia. This will also allow us to move beyond the confines of Anglophone circulation, and to engage with work in Spanish, French, Tamil, Hindi, and Afrikaans. The purpose of this workshop will be to share our expertise in particular poetic traditions; to identify other ‘craft wars’; and to explore alternative forms or moments in which political decolonization seems to animate literary undertakings.

Funded by the British Academy through the BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant scheme. Amount awarded: £9,795. Additional funding provided by an internal AHRS award.