The members of the Miya community in Assam, India have been facing an exacerbated threat of statelessness. Among the emancipatory grassroots organizations that have emerged to defend the rights of the Miya community, is an aesthetic resistance movement, now recognized as the ‘Miya Poetry’ movement. The bulk of the movement’s work since its emergence in 2016 has been to call attention to the discriminations and human rights violations faced by the Miya people in citizenship contestation processes. Miya poetry has, on the one hand, received wide acceptance as a poetry of protest and resistance in artistic, academic, and liberal media circles, while on the other, its contributors have been frequently criminalized or questioned by the state for their political views. In this article, we argue that Miya poetry should be looked at beyond the frames of resistance and protest in order to understand its social work as a human-rights movement. These poems have the affective capacity to build resilience, to facilitate complex understandings of difference, and to reimagine equality, democratic values, and freedom from forced assimilation as integral to the idea of citizenship. We used innovative methods to form our data corpus, combining life history interviews with analyses of selected poems. We deployed thematic analysis to report our results. The findings will be useful not only for the poets and artists of different genres who seek to defend human rights, but more broadly for global human-rights practices that wish to actuate a deeper reflective engagement with art-based activisms.

This paper takes the particular case of poetry to chart a middle route between the extremes of the autonomist and activist dimensions of understanding aesthetic politics. I argue that the politicality of poetry lies neither in the politics of the author or the text (activist), nor in their removedness vis-à-vis concrete political situations (autonomist). Instead, politicality needs to be located in the intersubjective dynamic between readers and poems or works of art more broadly. I propose an intersubjective pragmatist framework of interpretation, which takes the actualization of a decolonial and anti-identitarian political plurality as the basis of poetry’s politicality. I develop the framework by bringing together three conceptual frameworks: Hannah Arendt’s theory of political plurality, Édouard Glissant’s concepts of relation and opacity, and John Dewey’s pragmatist theory of aesthetic experience. At its core is the concept of ‘poetic understanding’, a transformative quality of understanding that facilitates between the reader and the text a dynamic and contingent process of mutual transformation and constitution. I explore the potential of such understanding as a ground for political community.