Traveling from coffee shops to universities across the nation, the spoken word poet duo known as Darkmatter carries with them fiery messages of anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and all out revolution. Together, South Asian trans artists Janani Balasubramanian and Alok Vaid-Menon take up the microphone and the pen, working in the mediums of written and spoken word poetry, prose, and essays. The duo met as undergraduates at Stanford University and began creating poetry together. Upon entering the slam poetry community, they were struck by the dearth of South Asian performers. As a result, they decided to launch a poetry tour together. While the exact nature of Darkmatter performances varies, one constant is a biting social commentary and an eagerness to draw audiences well out of their comfort zones. I locate what I term a queer corrective poetics at the marrow of Darkmatter’s spoken word art. The function of this poetic mode is to negotiate new discursive spaces for queer/trans people and people of color (QTPOC) while criticizing groups that perpetuate systems of marginalization. This intrinsically interrogative property of the duo’s work champions both visibility and audibility of QTPOC. I find this noteworthy because Darkmatter refuses to blindly ally themselves with queer America or with South Asian-Americans for the sake of community-building. Instead, they confront both groups (as well as heterosexual white America) thus exemplifying a particular brand of self-assertion that queer people of color sometimes abandon in the interest of creating solidarity. In listening to Darkmatter performances, it quickly becomes evident that Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon are bringing forth a new generation of transnational queerness that is highly aggressive and unrepentant. A queer corrective poetics is confrontational, parodic, self-aware, unapologetic, and didactic. I will unpack these individual qualities as they appear in Darkmatter’s work in order to show their importance and interconnectivity.
About the presenterRita Mookerjee
Rita Mookerjee is a PhD student at Florida State University. She holds an MA in Literature from Temple University. Her scholarly areas of interest include postcolonial literature, queer theory, and performance studies.