ABSTRACT
The terrain of the everyday doesn’t lend itself to an analysis of the possibilities of dissent, literary or otherwise. The indelible example of dissent contemporary with Lefebvre’s work emerges not in France, but in the colonised Caribbean. Unsurprisingly, everyday life in American postwar poetry presents itself as a series of stress tests related to shopping. The question of everyday occupation, tension, and the lyric registration of unevenness is cast in a different light in the example of the postwar quotidian, titled ‘A Step Away from Them’. A poem like Cronin’s indexes and embodies the connection between core and periphery underscoring even the most seemingly mundane details of everyday life – within an unavoidably political frame. If poetic dissent in the postwar period takes a variety of forms in meeting, on the one hand, the challenge of decolonisation, and on the other, the rise of the spectacle, it has to be acknowledged that twenty-first-century writers face challenges of a different order.
