The July 2024 student-led uprising in Bangladesh ignited a new wave of protest poetry. Although the uprising received considerable political and historical attention, its literary impact remains critically underexplored. Therefore, this study aims to explore how the poetic works emerging from the uprising serve as both aesthetic responses and symbolic resistance, documenting collective psychosocial wounds and challenging the state narratives. Drawing on postlapsarianism, trauma, cultural memory, and resistance literature scholarship, this research employs a qualitative content analysis of ten poems and two digital protest rap tracks circulated in mainstream online newspapers and on social media platforms between July and August 2024. They were purposively chosen based on themes of trauma, memory, state violence, and resistance. The findings reveal recurring motifs of moral decline, temporal fragmentation, symbolic reclamation, and embodied defiance, illustrating how the texts negotiate disillusionment while restoring ethical visions. These texts preserve memory through symbolic codification, ritualise collective memory by repeatedly invoking past martyrs, reclaim memories of present-day fallen protesters, and resist state-sponsored amnesia through counter-archiving. They frame poetry as a site of disruption and transformation, where broken syntax, ritualised language, and sonic insurgency articulate what official discourse suppresses. Digital hip-hop and chant poetry further weaponise language through repetition, vernacular intensity, and online circulation, converting individual suffering into participatory collective defiance. By positioning these texts within Global South resistance aesthetics, the research enhances understanding of literature’s role in mediating trauma, preserving cultural memory, sustaining democratic imagination, and reshaping political consciousness amid post-crisis societies.

Keywords: Collective Trauma; Counter Memory; Digital Dissent; Memory and Identity; Mnemonic Aesthetics

DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2026-3202-12

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