Materiality, Agency, and the “Revised Sublime” in Northeast Indian Anglophone Poetry

Abstract

This paper undertakes a new materialist reading of the corpus of Anglophone poetry originating from India’s Northeastern states by instrumentalizing the experience of the sublime as a cultural technique that endorses the operations of its surrounding human-nonhuman network. A close reading of the corpus of poetry from India’s Northeast reflects the “material turn” in the discourse of humanities scholarship that involves other interrelated discourses such as feminism, ecocriticism, posthumanism, and material culture studies etc. Human intervention in the landscape producing the experience of the revised sublime disrupts the set distinctions and explores the unfolding of a more-than-human world which provides a larger space for reinventing the narratives. The inhabitants of this region feel a connection between the changes seen in their natural surroundings and their half-forgotten history of ethnic identities. The corpus problematises the concept of extinction by revealing several paradoxical patterns of human existences therein. The concluding part reflects on the affect produced from the experiences of the revised sublime in reconstructing the relationships between humans, nature and the material world. Through the lens of new materialism, this essay will explore how these paradoxical matrices posit the notion of the ‘revised sublime’ and affect at the centre of discussion that nullifies the distinction between organic and inorganic matters and manifests agentic capabilities within inorganic matters.