Poetry of Movement: Virality, Affect and Agency in Warsan Shire’s “Home”
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Narratives & Worlds
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
This paper will study virality as a form of unsupervised movement peculiar to digital space that defies traditional modalities of circulation and reach. The ethos of movement that lie at the heart of virality interacts in complicated ways with the spatial and temporal aesthetics of digital platforms, producing new affective and political regimes. By studying Warsan Shire’s poem titled “Home” that went viral in 2016, it will be argued that when a text attains virality, there is a paradigm qualitative shift in modalities of engagement that include experiences of reception and forms of participation. The qualities of seriality and repetition that define digital spatiality, engender endless fluctuations and mutations of the poem, simultaneously establishing intimacies between the poem and the readers.
Virality also leads to a re-mediation of emotions in digital spaces, transforming the contours of political participation. The assemblage of bodies, human and non-human, which constitute online social networks, lead to affective exchanges which propel bodies to act, to align oneself with other individuals and communities. Within the dynamic digital archives of social networks, “affect accumulates, sediments and provides additional cultural significance to that which gets circulated” (Paasonen). Moreover, these affective attunements are also symptomatic of Lauren Berlant’s understanding of the desire for the political in contemporary times. In their search for the multiple idioms for the habitation of the desire for the political, Berlant locates the political in the “commitment to the present activity of the senses” (261). Summarily, the paper will study the aesthetic, affective and political ramifications that arise from the unsupervised flow of literary narratives through online spaces.
Works Cited:
Paasonen, Susanna. “A Midsummer’s Bonfire: Affective Intensities and Online Debate.” Networked Affect, edited by Ken Hillis, Susanna Paasonen, and Michael Petit, The MIT Press, 2015, pp. 27–42.
Berlant, Lauren. “On the Desire for the Political.” Cruel Optimism, Duke University Press, 2011, pp. 223–263.
Poetry of Movement: Virality, Affect and Agency in Warsan Shire’s “Home”
Narratives & Worlds
This paper will study virality as a form of unsupervised movement peculiar to digital space that defies traditional modalities of circulation and reach. The ethos of movement that lie at the heart of virality interacts in complicated ways with the spatial and temporal aesthetics of digital platforms, producing new affective and political regimes. By studying Warsan Shire’s poem titled “Home” that went viral in 2016, it will be argued that when a text attains virality, there is a paradigm qualitative shift in modalities of engagement that include experiences of reception and forms of participation. The qualities of seriality and repetition that define digital spatiality, engender endless fluctuations and mutations of the poem, simultaneously establishing intimacies between the poem and the readers.
Virality also leads to a re-mediation of emotions in digital spaces, transforming the contours of political participation. The assemblage of bodies, human and non-human, which constitute online social networks, lead to affective exchanges which propel bodies to act, to align oneself with other individuals and communities. Within the dynamic digital archives of social networks, “affect accumulates, sediments and provides additional cultural significance to that which gets circulated” (Paasonen). Moreover, these affective attunements are also symptomatic of Lauren Berlant’s understanding of the desire for the political in contemporary times. In their search for the multiple idioms for the habitation of the desire for the political, Berlant locates the political in the “commitment to the present activity of the senses” (261). Summarily, the paper will study the aesthetic, affective and political ramifications that arise from the unsupervised flow of literary narratives through online spaces.
Works Cited:
Paasonen, Susanna. “A Midsummer’s Bonfire: Affective Intensities and Online Debate.” Networked Affect, edited by Ken Hillis, Susanna Paasonen, and Michael Petit, The MIT Press, 2015, pp. 27–42.
Berlant, Lauren. “On the Desire for the Political.” Cruel Optimism, Duke University Press, 2011, pp. 223–263.
Bio
Shweta Khilnani is a PhD scholar at the Department of English, University of Delhi. Her PhD dissertation focuses on the interactions between the literary, the affective and the political with respect to digital narratives. She is also as Assistant Professor in the department of English at SGTB Khalsa College, University of Delhi. Her recent publications include co-edited collections of essays titled Science Fiction in India: Parallel Worlds and Postcolonial Paradigms and Imagining Worlds, Mapping Possibilities: Select Science Fiction Stories.