In this chapter, I explore historical phenomena across a century of African American poetry, mapping a series of trends through which Black vernacular music and language come together in distinct poetic modes. Within this tradition, poets have consistently innovated the genre by incorporating culturally specific forms and expressive practices from the Black vernacular. While this conflation of music and writing has led to much innovation, it also carries immense political significance, by challenging the hegemony of Western aesthetic criteria and recording Black experience and cultural knowledge against racism’s denigrations or erasures. In this multiform articulation of Black subjectivity across time, African American poets have continually affirmed the importance of music as a cultural repository and a model for alternative poetics.

Both John Milton and Andrew Marvell have been revaluated in recent years. Yet this is the first sustained scholarly work to compare the two great seventeenth-century poets. In his new book, which stands as the culmination of a distinguished academic career, Warren Chernaik examines the relationship of the two writers and their complex responses to their troubled times. The poets were close friends, yet the trajectory of their careers and their posthumous reputations differed significantly. As well as taking an active part in the major political and religious upheavals of their times, both poets engaged seriously with classical, Christian, and humanist thought. Combining close readings of their poetry and prose with detailed consideration of historical and intellectual context, Chernaik sheds fresh light on the enduring works of poets whose words still resonate strongly with today’s readers.

Both John Milton and Andrew Marvell have been revaluated in recent years. Yet this is the first sustained scholarly work to compare the two great seventeenth-century poets. In his new book, which stands as the culmination of a distinguished academic career, Warren Chernaik examines the relationship of the two writers and their complex responses to their troubled times. The poets were close friends, yet the trajectory of their careers and their posthumous reputations differed significantly. As well as taking an active part in the major political and religious upheavals of their times, both poets engaged seriously with classical, Christian, and humanist thought. Combining close readings of their poetry and prose with detailed consideration of historical and intellectual context, Chernaik sheds fresh light on the enduring works of poets whose words still resonate strongly with today’s readers.

In order to characterize how African American poets enacted a version of the avant-garde, this chapter connects the formation of Black writers’ collectives in the 1980s and 1990s to the original theories of the avant-garde in which artistic dissent was tied to social withdrawal and political dissent. It identifies how the Dark Room Collective of the 1980s and early 1990s and the Black Took Collective of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century used their bohemian withdrawal to cultivate innovative artistic practices that led, paradoxically, to mainstream success. Since that success defies racial disparagement in ways analogous to how the collective withdrawal did, this chapter posits that "success" as an "avant-garde thing," an ambivalent extension of avant-garde dissent.

In the course of its three versions (October 1926 – February 1927 and November 1927 – January 1928), Lady Chatterley’s Lover gradually morphed into a more mythic casting of the state of the world and its future. The third version is bathed in the afterglow of Lawrence’s Etruscan essays of mid-1927, Sketches of Etruscan Places, and partly conditioned by his short stories and essays of 1927. For Lawrence, it was a matter of developing his imaginative vectors – the obdurate industrial and social circumstances of the Midlands on the one hand, which a visit home in 1926 had tempted him to come to grips with, and a future of tenderness on the other – and then deploying them to see what they might yield in the performative writing event. Realism, a response to the working-class settings, slowly gave way to celebration of the ‘eternity of the naïve moment’, coming from before Plato and available in the present if only love-idealism and sentiment could be overthrown.

Background

Madhesh, a region rich in culture and history and the heartland of the ancient Mithila kingdom, is celebrated as the birthplace of revered figures such as Sita and Gargi, women who embody wisdom, power, and empowerment. As daughters of Mithila, their legacy should have been one of empowerment for all Madheshi women, fostering a sense of strength and agency among those residing in their homeland. Yet, contrary to this legacy, Madheshi women today find themselves marginalized in their own land, treated as outsiders both by their own patriarchal society and by the nationalist discourse of the Nepali state, which views Madhesh as a peripheral and contested space. This dual marginalization places Madheshi women in a complex state of “otherness,” where they are not only excluded from the mainstream narratives of Nepali identity but also subjected to restrictive patriarchal norms within their own community (Gautam 2008; Ghimire 2018). To understand this paradox, we must delve into the forces that have conspired to marginalize these women and examine why the legacy of empowerment has not been passed down to the women of Mithila, that is, “Madhesh.”

In the sociopolitical landscape of Nepal, Madheshi women endure a unique form of intersectional oppression that intertwines gender-based and ethnic discrimination. They face the multidimensional nature of marginalization that includes patriarchal constraints within their community and systemic exclusion from the broader nationalist discourse. As a result, Madheshi women find themselves “doubly othered,” experiencing dual layers of discrimination that render their struggles distinct within Nepal's feminist and social justice movements.

The Introduction establishes the aims and bounds of the study, which examines attitudes towards, and uses of, the written word in Kent, Mercia and Wessex from the 830s to the 920s. The Introduction provides an overview of scholarship that has informed the study, as well as the new perspectives that it seeks to provide. The structure of the study is also explained.

Background

Bala Krishna Sama (1902–1981), the doyen of Nepali drama, wrote an epic entitled Chiso Chulho (1958), or “cold hearth.” This epic is woven around the theme of a silent but very strong love relationship between Gauri, a so-called high caste girl, and Sante, a Dalit young man. Sama has chosen to write an epic on the theme of inter-caste love, which was not accepted by the traditional Nepali society. In this epic Sama has dramatized the moments and conditions of alterity. Sama chooses the epic genre to write about othering in a caste-ridden society that he experienced and inherited because this genre gives him space to play at once with tradition and individuality. Sama has chosen to describe the agony of the characters by giving them poetic elevation, thereby deconstructing the canonical norm, which requires that the hero of the epic should be one who hails from the upper echelon or caste of society. By selecting a Dalit or the so-called low-caste male character named Sante, who tailors clothes as part of his traditional occupation, Sama has used all the accoutrements of the epic genre in this oeuvre.

Sante's love for the higher-caste woman Gauri has introduced an unsolved theme that reverberates even in today's Nepali society, which claims to have made achievements in terms of eliminating the excesses of casteism and improving the conditions of women. We can imagine what would have happened if Gauri and Sante had taken a rebellious stand nearly seven decades ago. As a reminder, we can take the widely reported and discussed tragic incident resulting in the death of several young men of Rukum Karnali that happened on May 20, 2020, perpetrated to foil the love between a high-caste girl and a Dalit boy.

The title of this volume, The Other Nepal, implies that there exists a more visible, globally recognizable, widely represented, and geopolitically marked entity called “Nepal” to which the other Nepal merely plays a shadowy, sketchy, and spectral sidekick that is routinely overlooked, forgotten, and silenced. The origin of this internal schism may be traced to an ideologically fraught and rancorous debate between two camps of Nepalese historians and philologists over the denotation of the letter “ने” (Ne) in the word “Nepal.” Hindu historians of Nepal see in it an ancient Hindu sage named “Ne” and claim that he is the protector (palak) of the land. Those opposed to this anthropomorphizing and Sanskritization assert that “Nepal” derives from the Tibeto-Burman words nhyet, meaning cattle, and pa, meaning man, and claim that this non-Hindu and zoomorphic signification has gradually been displaced and erased from Nepali history, languages, and cultures. This erasure in their eyes represents and embodies a larger and more sinister pattern of internal colonization of Indigenous and ethnic populations and cultures of Nepal.

This book carries tentative inscriptions of this eclipsed, erased, internally colonized, and othered Nepal. It intends to probe into the apparent dyad between the Nepal that arrogates to itself the role of defining and representing the entire nation and the Nepal that is effectively silenced by the hegemonic discourses and practices of nationalism and by the hierarchies premised on caste, ethnicity, and gender. The tenor of the analysis and research collected in this book, therefore, is at once investigative, critical, inclusive, and ethical. To inquire into and bring to light what has hitherto been largely invisible and to investigate the causes, conditions, and consequences of such invisibility are the primary goals of this volume.

On February 24, 2021, two Newar activists, Suman Sayami and Birochan Shrestha, found themselves behind bars for speaking their native language. As representatives of an advocacy group for the victims of the city's road expansion project, they had visited the police station to meet six protestors who had been arrested earlier that day at the construction site of a major highway exit at Bajalu, Kathmandu. These protestors were part of a group of locals who were demonstrating against the city for unfairly appropriating their land and demolishing their homes for road expansion. At the police station, Suman and Birochan spoke with the jailed activists in Nepalbhasa, a language the police officers did not understand. When the police told them to speak in Nepali, they refused to comply, and they too were taken into custody (Deśasancāra 2021).

Although they were all released by the Supreme Court's order the following week, the incident ignited a wave of outrage and protests across the city. In the days following their arrest, protestors gathered at Indrachowk in Kathmandu, holding placards and chanting slogans declaiming language rights, land rights, Newar unity, and justice for the victims of the state's land encroachment (AawaajNews 2021). This incident was a reminder that language is a crucial aspect of power dynamics, especially in the context of a multilingual nation like Nepal where language hierarchies have shaped unequal access to social, economic, and political power. As Nepali is widely recognized as the official language of the country, the police officers saw Nepalbhasa as a threat to their authority and sought to silence it. This rendered the act of speaking in the language – especially in institutional spaces like the police station – an affront to authority and, thus, a political act.

Suyogbir and Sakambari, though they look well-matched, are worlds apart. Shirishko Phool (translated as Blue Mimosa), a critically acclaimed novel by Bishnu Kumari Waiba (1937–1993), who went by her literary sobriquet “Parijat,” revolves around a one-sided love entanglement between two characters with radically different personalities. Suyogbir, an ex-Gurkha1 in his mid-forties, falls in love with Sakambari, an alpha female half his age. He is a deeply troubled womanizing hedonist full of self-doubt. Sakambari, on the other hand, is a young, strong-willed rebel in her mid-twenties. She is the antithesis of a cliched Nepali woman – she is assertive, smokes a lot, has short hair, and is sharp-tongued – in short, a woman without the normative feminine grace. Although Sakambari is out of Suyogbir's league, he gets attracted to her. Over time, his feelings toward her evolve into an all-consuming obsession, making him confess his love with a “kiss” that leads to Sakambari's subsequent death.

Within the linearity of this deceptively simple unrequited love, Shrishko Phool weaves a complex tapestry of passion and desire, and questions on the twisted realities of life. The text has been able to garner mixed critiques – praised as a compelling text providing an astute observation on the absurdities typical of modern life and criticized as a depressing text lacking originality with heavy Western influence. Nevertheless, the novel has established itself as an existentialist classic in the Nepali canon.

The conclusion brings together the findings of the previous chapters. It reiterates the importance of the mid-ninth century, since the written word was used more extensively than in prior decades to uphold and confirm social, political and economic transactions. This provides an important context for understanding the extraordinary literary endeavours of Alfred’s later reign: in the generation before Alfred, both lay and ecclesiastic people were already experimenting with – and thinking about – the social values of literary culture. It must be stressed, however, that developments were not uniform across Kent, Mercia and Wessex. Literary culture was not limited to a single agency or context, and competing visions and practices existed throughout the ninth and early tenth centuries. One of the most striking aspects to this is that, in some contexts, resources and Latin literacy levels appear to have been limited, yet documentary production continued. If anything, such limited resources intensified the value of the written word as a commodity. The Conclusion also considers what follows in the mid- and late tenth century. Several strands of continuity are identified, though social and institutional changes need to be borne in mind.