The World of Agha Shahid Ali

Tapan Kumar Ghosh, Sisir Kumar Chatterjee, Tapan Kumar Ghosh, Sisir Kumar Chatterjee

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781438481449, 9781438481456
• eBook ISBN: 9781438484334
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Critical essays on the transnational Kashmiri-American poet.

Featuring essays by American, Indian, and British scholars, this collection offers critical appraisals and personal reflections on the life and work of the transnational poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001). Though sometimes identified as an "Indian writer in English," Shahid came to designate himself as a Kashmiri-American writer in exile in the United States, where he lived for the latter half of his life, publishing seven volumes of poetry and teaching at colleges and universities across the country. Locating Shahid in a diasporic space of exile, the volume traces the poet's transnationalist attempts to bridge East and West and his movement toward a true internationalism. In addition to offering close formal analyses of most of Shahid's poems and poetry collections, the contributors also situate him in relation to both Western and subcontinental poetic forms, particularly the ghazal. Many also offer personal anecdotes that convey the milieu in which the poet lived and wrote, as well as his personal preoccupations. The book concludes with the poet's 1997 interview with Suvir Kaul, which appears in print here for the first time.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Agha Shahid Ali: A Chronology
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Ghazal for Open Hands
• 2 Shahid, Some Memories
• 3 Somewhere without Me My Life Begins
• 4 Beloved Witness, Beloved Friend
• 5 Agha Shahid Ali: Notes and Anecdotes on the Growth of the Poet
• 6 “Separation’s Geography”: Agha Shahid Ali’s Scholarship of Evanescence
• 7 Agha Shahid Ali and the Ghazals in English
• 8 “I will open the waves”: Examining the Hybrid Forms in Agha Shahid Ali’s Poetry
• 9 Out of Focus: Agha Shahid Ali’s Queer Optics
• 10 Beginnings: A Journey with Micronarratives
• 11 Braiding Disparate Strands: Tracing the Arcs of Agha Shahid Ali’s The Half-Inch Himalayas
• 12 Dialing a Joke: Agha Shahid Ali’s Long-Distance Calls to Lands without a Post Office
• 13 Archiving Absences: Charting Chronotopes in Agha Shahid Ali’s Cartography of Desire
• 14 Tradition, Home, and Exile in Agha Shahid Ali’s The Beloved Witness
• 15 “It Is This”: Agha Shahid Ali’s Representation of Kashmir in The Country without a Post Office
• 16 Epistemology of Mourning: A Reading of Rooms Are Never Finished
• 17 Let Your Mirrored Convexities Multiply: On Agha Shahid Ali’s “Tonight”
• 18 An Interview with Agha Shahid Ali
• Bibliography
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover