UC Berkeley

Invoking the dual meanings of "bayt" as a line of verse and as a home or dwelling place, this dissertation queries the intersections of poetic form with Third World allegories of the home as nation. It links post-Nakba innovations to— and violations of— the poetic line to the perceived limitations of nation-building projects as they surfaced in the cultures of solidarity that linked outposts of the decolonizing and developing world. Unfolding a dialectic between the nationalist impulse subtending theories of cultural decolonization and regional, transnational, and cross-linguistic poetry movements, my project foregrounds poetry as the privileged technique by which Third World writers challenged their inheritance of a colonial political form: the European nation-state and its investments in racial and national difference. Identifying a pervasive, mythopoetic tendency in Third World poetry, my dissertation argues for the homology between Third Worldist anti-colonialism and what I call Third Worldist anti-realism, which, as I go on to show, was inclusive of new realism, social symbolism, and surrealism. In each chapter of my dissertation, I situate site-specific theories of cultural decolonization alongside examples of Third World mythopoetry that animate, unsettle, or enact these theories. My first chapter excavates Iraqi modernist poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab’s Tammuzi poems for the Algerian Revolution, published in the Beirut-based literary journal al-Adab (Literature). Third Worldist poetics and politics are broached through the regional solidarities inscribed by al-Sayyab’s pan-Arab poems, as well as Frantz Fanon’s theory of national culture, rooted in the Algerian example. My second chapter looks to Iranian theories of cultural imperialism, linking them to their Third World referents and to a counter-cultural, Islamic aesthetic that surfaces in the Saqqakhaneh poetry of Ahmad Shamlu and Forrough Farrokhzad. My final chapter centers Lebanese poet Etel Adnan’s surrealist and speculative poetry, published in the Moroccan journal of cultural decolonization, Souffles, and addressed to the Palestinian revolution. This dissertation contends that Third World solidarity necessitated an anti-realist aesthetic that sought not a divestment from reality, but a deeper engagement with it.