Dalit Poetry and the Aesthetics of Traumatic Materialism

Abstract

This article examines and theorises the emergence of an aesthetic of Dalit poetry that it terms ‘traumatic materialism’. It resists the tendency to treat Dalit poetry as social documentary, and instead unravels an aesthetic that builds on the realist mode but moves beyond it. Studying two main themes in Dalit poems, corporeal trauma and labour, the article proposes that traumatic materialism forces us to move beyond the realist mode of recording the eye-witnessing of corporeal pain in everyday Dalit lives to ‘bearing witness’ to something unspeakable and not quite visible, which is the pain’s subtext.