Students’ Park: A Poetic Dispatch as Placemaking Methodology

Abstract

This piece is a creative intervention in the trope of research article writing. This ‘Poetic Dispatch’ is a response to be sent to the readers of this scholarly journal. It transgresses and extends the limit of its readership and genre by employing the ode form of poetic expression. It stresses Doreen Massey’s proposition that space is an incomplete event, always in becoming. The author takes the liberty of transitioning between voices; changing places as observer and observed, cataloguing and producing the space simultaneously. The photographs assert authentic presences. Situated in a students’ park in an Indian university campus, this text uses what Jacques Derrida calls the absence of the center to refer to the reader’s equal power to produce and ascribe meaning to the space. This students’ park acts like a Derridaean heterotopia where there is the coexistence of various orders of local and global without the prevalence of any.

Keywords:

• built spaces
• city miniature
• Derridean play
• open spaces
• common spaces
• site writing

Acknowledgements

This piece is inspired by the year 2013 in Indian English literature which saw the production of short city biographies of Bombay, Delhi, Patna and Madras by Naresh Fernandes, Malvika Singh, Amitava Kumar and Nirmala Lakshman, respectively.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Neha Kumari

Neha Kumari is a PhD candidate at the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences in Himachal Pradesh, India. She is pursuing her research in English Literature. She holds bachelor and master’s degrees in English Literature from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India. An avid reader and poetry enthusiast, Kumari writes in Hindi and English using an experimental style that employs an economy of words. Her research interests are contemporary British fiction, Indian English literature, migration and memory studies, urban cultural studies and city writings.