| Summary: | <p class="first" id="d138494e91">Recent criticism has considered how literary texts harness historical and ideological
forces in the representation of the body. However, much of that scholarship focuses
on hegemonic structures such as Western medicine, post-human technologies or colonial
race theories. This article looks at how two poets from the Americas – Indigenous
North American Chrystos (Menominee) and Mahadai Das from Guyana – express representations
of the body from a position of marginalisation to emphasise the connections between
individual subjectivity and social transformation. I discuss the body as theme for
producing a resistance poetry that directly connects desire, disaffection, sexuality
and mourning to decolonisation. I perform close readings that emphasise the linkages
between intimate relations and social movements. Chrystos and Das speak to a constitutive
divide in post-colonial studies between the personal and political in what is called
resistance literature. By centring deeply personal perspectives on decolonial struggle
within a figurative context that encourages contemplation and complexity, these poets
contribute to a diversification of resistance theory that addresses gender, anti-racist,
sexual diversity and other movements of the last few decades.
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