Gender studies

Sociology

Fieldnotes

Solidarity

Poetics

Politics

Literature

Aesthetics

Decolonization

Philosophy

Political science

Poetry

Ethnography

Anthropology

Grassroots

Subaltern

Postcolonialism (international relations)

Qualitative Inquiry

In this article, I present insurgent poetry as a way to decolonize ethnographic knowing. I argue that insurgent poetry tethered to grassroots struggles represents a critical site for decolonizing relationships in activist ethnography. My activist ethnographic work takes place alongside, and in solidarity with Miya communities in Northeast India, who have been disenfranchised and face persecution and statelessness. Presenting poems that effervesced in relation to “fieldwork,” I theorize poetry as a decolonial enactment: a form of witnessing that resists a disciplining colonial gaze and creates possibilities for decolonial onto-epistemic rupture/reorientation; in doing so, allowing for radical relationality and reciprocal knowing.

The Politics and Poetics of “Fieldnotes”: Decolonizing Ethnographic Knowing