Tribal Mizo Poetry: Resignification through Identitarian Performance

Abstract

With the unprecedented eruptions in the posthumanistic narratives, the consistencies and stabilities attached to the phenomenon called knowledge or the questions of epistemology comprising the knowledge of the world and its legitimacy have been undermined by the ontological inquiries concerning the existence of the worlds itself. This shift from the epistemic to ontological is boiled down in the contraction glocal which problemetizes the fixity of existence and opens the doors for a discursive reading of the monolithic narratives. Such non-elite and provincial narratives which purport to be the only extant repositories of culture and history, find their teleology and definitions in danger of being subsumed by the grand narratives of progress and globalization. Though you don’t have to be a skeptic to announce that culture as a phenomenon stands problematized today yet the fiefdom of culture and diversity would make one think otherwise i.e. the one who rallies for the reification of myths and legends inscribed in a particular collective imaginary through culture muesealism or preservation, is a prude purist who is an oddity in this emerging regime of production and capitalism. Needless to say, culture needs to be salvaged from its one dimensional interpretation mediated by temporality and spatiality. It requires to be measured in terms of cultural genealogy which is in a state of flux and reinvents itself in every epoch, complicating time and space as opposed to its overdetermined suggestions confined to historical consciousness. The subjects of this global regime culture’s must then become, like Hannah Arendt’s figure of refugee, “the paradigm of historical consciousness.” (Agamben 6) History and culture then must not be relinquished as the temporalities and moments of past which have met with a discursive death due to the fickle epistemes and the newly found projects of modernity and postmodernity. History is to be seen in the light of ‘history in the making’ and culture as ‘cultural reincarnation’ which shall replace the biopolitical (where all the human abilities, the bios is invested in the projects of production) with historical and ethicocultural moment aiming to rehumanize the dehumanized. Tribals in India with the recently acquired cursed tag of Gramscian subalterns are facing the crisis of history and culture whereby the narrative of glocal, otherwise deified in the progressive culture, is subsuming the Humanist local with its post- and anti-humanist narrative wherein only the resources for more and more production for the capitalist economies matter and not the rudiments of humanity and the attached empathy, innocence and animation.