Abstract The following essay meditates on how an orientation to poetics, with its creative modes of thinking, unlearning, and intervention, may aid contemplation of worlds as they are and worlds as they might be. It begins with the question of how we might think about the contemporary sociopolitical function of poetics, and explores relations among poetics, imaginative capacities, and the plausibility of futures beyond existing precarities. The exploration proceeds in three stages. First, it analyzes James Baldwin's poetic approach to the Atlanta child murders, showing how he sought meanings obscured in official narratives. Second, it examines Léopold Sédar Senghor's view of poets as visionaries who imagine alternative futures. Third, it conceptualizes poetics as engaging the experiential connections between people, fostering “amateur diplomacies” that disrupt normative politics and its tendency to closures. With reflections on how poetics might reanimate subjugated knowledges and nourish political life, the paper suggests that poetics reveals the entanglements and relationalism that reified categories obscure, interrupts common sense political narratives, and thereby enables other modes of being-in-relation.
Shiera S. el-Malik (Tue,) studied this question.
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