Postcolonial Poetics

Description

Postcolonial Poetics is about how we read postcolonial and world literatures today, and about how the structures of that writing shape our reading. The book’s eight chapters explore the ways in which postcolonial writing in English from various 21st-century contexts, including southern and West Africa, and Black and Asian Britain, interacts with our imaginative understanding of the world. Throughout, the focus is on reading practices, where reading is taken as an inventive, border-traversing activity, one that postcolonial writing with its interests in margins, intersections, subversions, and crossings specifically encourages. This close, sustained focus on reading, reception, and literariness is an outstanding feature of the study, as is its wide generic range, embracing poetry, essays, and life-writing, as well as fiction. The field-defining scholar Elleke Boehmer holds that literature has the capacity to keep reimagining and refreshing how we understand ourselves in relation to the world and to some of the most pressing questions of our time, including resistance, reconciliation, survival after terror, and migration. Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv Postcolonial Poetics—A Score for Reading (Elleke Boehmer)....Pages 1-17 Questions of Postcolonial Poetics (Elleke Boehmer)....Pages 19-38 Revisiting Resistance Literature—Writing in Juxtaposition (Elleke Boehmer)....Pages 39-61 Postcolonial Writing, Terror, and Continuity: Okri, D’Aguiar, NourbeSe Philip, Shire (Elleke Boehmer)....Pages 63-85 Repetitive Poetics—When Crisis Defines a Nation’s Writing. Contemporary South African Novels (Elleke Boehmer)....Pages 87-117 Poetics and Persistence: Chinua Achebe’s Shaping Influence (Elleke Boehmer)....Pages 119-143 Concepts of Exchange—Poetics in Postcolonial, World, and World-Systems Literatures (Elleke Boehmer)....Pages 145-172 The Transformative Force of the Postcolonial Line: Protest Poetry and the Global Short Story (Elleke Boehmer)....Pages 173-192 Back Matter ....Pages 193-220