Can poems show us a way to be part of a many-voiced history, to be with, a part of, despite being an outsider? What complex kinds of understanding do we need to sustain solidarities across the dividing lines of race, coloniality, caste, and class, and to create processes of sharing that do not undermine social difference or the particularity of individual experience? And can we look towards poetry, towards the dynamic between poems and readers, to offer us a model for such understanding? Where instituted racial and colonial hierarchies obstruct complex understandings of some ‘others’ as who they are and not what they are, can poetry help us?

In this project, I propose an intersubjective pragmatist framework for reading poetry that takes the actualization of a decolonial and anti-identitarian political plurality as the basis of poetry’s politicality. At its core is the concept of ‘poetic understanding’: a transformative quality of understanding that is a necessarily dynamic, contingent, non-hierarchical, and anti-identitarian process of transformation and constitution, where who I am comes to be constituted in my process of understanding, as does who the other is. I develop this framework by bringing together four distinct conceptual fields: I build on Hannah Arendt’s theory of political plurality, Édouard Glissant’s concepts of relation and opacity, John Dewey’s pragmatist theory of aesthetic experience, and Sylvia Wynter’s model of decipherment to examine poetry as a site of intersubjective transformation, where a genuine plurality of relation in interaction, divested of discriminatory and hierarchizing mechanics, can be actualized. In such a conceptualization of poetic understanding, I argue, lies an as-yet-underestimated cornerstone of solidary understanding, and the crux of poetry’s political contribution.

(Winner of the ASCA Dissertation Prize 2023)