A Poetics of Decolonization: Literary Entanglements, Textual Solidarities, and the Progressive Writers' Movement, South-Asia, c.1934-1980.

On the evening of November 23, 1934, a group of Indian students met in the backroom of the Nanking restaurant in London to lay the foundations for their visions of a "progressive" literature for the times. Critically reflecting on their shared experience as colonized subjects in the metropole, they sought to outline the role that writers and artists would play in the struggle to free the Indian subcontinent from British rule.

While born out of the political agitations for Indian independence, the students who met that evening in London aligned themselves to a global movement against imperialism and fascism. Active from the 1930s to the 1980s, they published journals and newspapers; brought into their fold poets, painters, and performers through different forums; and built networks of Third World solidarity with other Asian and African artists across territorial borders.

My project seeks to chart the political, personal, and transnational journeys of this self-avowed group of left-wing, "progressive", peripatetic individuals. I argue that tracing these histories allows us to grasp how writers, artists, and performers crafted visions for a decolonial world free from colonial domination, imperial rule, and fascist repression. In looking back at the worldly, relational, and transnational aspirations of the PWA, my dissertation will recover the rich imaginations of postcolonial belonging, freedom, and subjectivity that decolonization spanned beyond the realm of state-relations and narratives of anticolonial nationalisms.