Postcolonial Poetics

21st-Century Critical Readings

Elleke Boehmer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319903415
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Moderne Literaturkritik

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.

© The Author(s) 2018

Elleke BoehmerPostcolonial Poeticshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90341-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Postcolonial Poetics—A Score for Reading

Elleke Boehmer¹

(1)

University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Elleke Boehmer

Keywords

Postcolonial poeticsPostcolonial writingReadingRepresentationPostcolonial world

End Abstract

Postcolonial Poetics is about how we read postcolonial literature today, and about how the structures of that writing shape our reading. The book’s eight chapters explore some of the ways in which postcolonial writing in English from various contemporary contexts 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 though not exclusively encourages. It is this focus on reading and reception that distinguishes Postcolonial Poetics from related studies in the field that have explored postcolonial literariness. The book also has a wider generic range, embracing poetry, essays, and life-writing, as well as fiction.¹ Postcolonial Poetics holds that literature—here 21st-century postcolonial writings from southern and West Africa, Black and Asian Britain, and India, in particular—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 cultural reconciliation, survival after terror, and migration. It also believes that literary writing itself lays down structures and protocols to shape and guide our reading. The creative principles that underpin these readings make up the poetics, here the postcolonial poetics, of the writing.

Until quite recently, postcolonial literary studies has tended to overlook or side-step questions of poetics as the ‘real world’ issues it has sought to confront have appeared by contrast so urgent. Postcolonial Poetics seeks to address this oversight and to suggest that considerations of the creative shape, formal structures and patterns of postcolonial writing might in fact sharpen rather than obscure our attention to those pressing themes. Taking several different pathways into the topic, the book attempts to think through and to rethink a postcolonial poetics—a poetics in postcolonial terms—as approached from the inside, or through how we receive it as readers. This rethinking does not only engage with literature as an instrument of social change, or even as a representation of certain geo-political conditions, as before, important though that engagement is. Rather, this rethinking also considers literature as a mode through which we understand the world and ourselves in it. This means trying to avoid treating postcolonial writing as primarily a means of designation or pointing at: as in, this feature is a national representation, that a reflection of the refugee crisis. This approach instead asks how writing as writing, and as received by readers, gives insight into aspects of our postcolonial world. It is something of a radical departure for a field in which the literary has often been read in terms of other orders of reality: social, political, or ethical. However, for Postcolonial Poetics, centrally, postcolonial writing is as concerned as other kinds of literary writing with questions of aesthetics—that is, with questions of form, structure, perception, and reception—and can offer insights of its own into how these elements work and come together.

Importantly, a reception-based or readerly pragmatics , as we might call this approach, sees literary structures not merely as giving shape to our thought as we read; rather, they are our thought. To read critically is therefore to work together with the text to trace out and to understand something of these cognitive processes in operation, and to see how our perceptions are directed and enlivened through them.² This focus on reading as a conversation between a reader and a text is indebted to critical cognitive approaches explored, for example, in Terence Cave’s Thinking with Literature (2016), but supplements them with a closer attention where appropriate to reader reception.³ This paying heed to readers is intended to show sensitivity to cultural difference and the enormous variability of audiences around the world—something that postcolonial writing always rightly asks us to address. Simultaneously, the approach also places emphasis on the recursive processes of going back over, of both re-writing and so of re-reading, that are so important to the postcolonial quarrel with tradition. Postcolonial Poetics shares with Cave’s study, in particular, a view of literature as a mode of thought that stimulates an imaginative exchange with its readers, and also its respect for the distinctiveness of the individual literary work. As in Thinking with Literature, my approach is guided in each case by the verbal energies of the work being read. At the same time my book does not purport to offer a new theoretical contribution to the field or even a new kind of reading. Its critical focus is on action and reception, on how we relate to texts by drawing their poetic features into our frameworks of perception and allowing them to mould, shape, and reshape our understanding.

In keeping with this emphasis on verbal energy, Postcolonial Poetics sets out to reflect on what it is that postcolonial writing can do, rather than consider only what it shows—hence the interest in pragmatics over pointing, in design over designation, and in reading defined first and foremost as communication, as we will see. As Bethan Benwell, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson observe in their book Postcolonial Audiences, postcolonial studies have historically been surprisingly inattentive to questions of audiences and reception, ‘despite instances of regionally specific studies’.⁴ Introducing their collection of audience- and market-focused essays, the three critics attribute this neglect to several factors including a distrust of empirical methodologies in a field that has always tried to respect the global scope of the literature it reads. Yet, as they point out, this focus on books over audiences has depended, paradoxically, on an unstated ‘formalism’, on finding in texts an abstract ‘transformative, resistant or subversive’ quality ‘removed from the contingent relations [the texts] share with different reading publics’.⁵

While Postcolonial Poetics takes a different direction from Benwell et al.’s interest in situated reading publics, my study is in close agreement with their observations on the unexamined abstractions that have governed the field. It takes this as encouragement for its focus on the text as something that is read, and on the heuristic power of literature as literature; specifically, on the verbal and structural dynamics, the poetics, through which our understanding of the particular postcolonial condition being represented (race, resistance, liberation, reconciliation, precarity, and so on) may be shaped and sharpened. This focus entails reflecting more closely on the status of the literary in a field in which literature has tended to be read illustratively or symptomatically, as an instantiation of paradigms drawn from a range of extra-literary studies—such as cultural studies, diaspora studies, anthropology. These approaches have consistently tended to take for granted the features of the literary object that distinguish it as different from other kinds of object.⁶

Importantly, the quest for a postcolonial poetics based in reading practice need not involve setting the field’s ongoing political concerns at a distance from the located, internalized perceptions that art forms such as postcolonial writing can open up. On the contrary, the one can be seen to provide clarifying, stimulating insight into the other. Such a politics-illuminating poetic relates to Derek Attridge’s idea of responsible reading as inhabiting a zone of ‘inevitable in-betweenness’, referring the words we read back to contexts from which they emerge, yet at the same time also to our ‘culturally derived way of thinking and feeling’.⁷ Therefore, while I remain committed to a critical vocabulary attentive to ‘on the ground’ perceptions and day-to-day struggles, as in previous work, I would also argue that a text’s political vision and cultural values are sedimented or concentrated within its figures and structures, and that a postcolonial reading attentive to such figures brings that vision and those values to light. Indeed, we might go further. A renewed account of postcolonial interpretation, we could say, gives us a fresh appreciation of those local, grounded postcolonial perceptions, and of the salience of postcolonial reading for understanding the late colonial and neo-imperial times we inhabit. Or, as Wale Adebanwi observes in respect of African writing’s often-emphasized social function, imaginative literature is centrally involved in ‘the articulation and mapping of the various dimensions of … social experience’.⁸

Postcolonial criticism, I contend throughout, ideally lays out a poetics as part of its analysis of postcolonial texts’ structural, symbolic, and perceptual effects, and while applying diagnostic frameworks such as ‘resistance’, ‘terror’, or ‘trauma’ to them, as Postcolonial Poetics will indeed set out to do.⁹ So, for example, when in this book chapter 4 considers writing beyond terror, or chapter 5, literary temporalities in the contemporary South African novel, these readings formulate a poetics related to how the texts recount the experiences in question. Likewise, chapter 6’s discussion of the genealogical poetics of writing after Achebe maps the affiliations of the writers who write back to and in dialogue with this father of African literature, and does so through exploring the metaphors of generation they use.

Since the publication of Barbara Harlow’s Resistance Literature in 1986, core critical procedures in postcolonial studies have taken writing and criticism to be forms of activism, responses to a range of troubled postcolonial conditions—partition, apartheid, civil war—that in turn invite an active response from the reader.¹⁰ As chapters 2 and 3 explore along different vectors, it has been assumed that in situations requiring resistance, literary writing can not only stimulate but in some cases ...