Aminatta Forna, OBE (novelist and memoirist, Lannan Visiting Professor of Poetics at Georgetown University) will be in conversation with Elleke Boehmer in the first event of the Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Series 2017-18 ‘Post-War: Commemoration, Reconstruction, Reconciliation’.
In this conversation, award-winning novelist and memoirist Aminatta Forna and Elleke Boehmer will discuss the ways in which Forna’s work (which includes her novel The Memory of Love and memoir about Sierra Leone, The Devil That Danced on the Water) have portrayed situations of conflict and post-conflict, and how literature can offer new perspectives on commemoration, reconstruction and reconciliation.
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Elleke Boehmer and acclaimed author Ali Smith will be the keynote speakers at the ‘Katherine Mansfield: New Directions’ international conference, which will take place on 28-29 June 2018 at Birkbeck, University of London.
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On Friday 22 September 2017, Elleke Boehmer will give the very first ‘Indische Letterenlezing’ in Leiden. She will be speaking on the future of the postcolonial past.
A detailed new review of Indian Arrivals, written by Anshuman A. Mondal, has been published in Volume 19, Issue 5 of Interventions (May 2017). In particular, Mondal praises Boehmer’s ‘extraordinarily sensitive and skilful reading[s]’ and describes the book as ‘a formidable demonstration of her skill as a literary critic’. Some other highlights:
Elleke Boehmer is one of the very few genuine literary all-rounders, as capable of writing excellent fiction as she is works of literary scholarship.
[…]
Indian Arrivals is a work of great subtlety, fleshing out the contrapuntal, intercultural encounters between Indians and Britons in the metropolitan contact zone of empire with deft skill and attention to nuance, and it takes its place alongside other landmark works produced by the groundbreaking interdisciplinary “Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad” project, which has collectively produced a corpus of scholarship that will inform understandings of the South Asian contribution to British life for years to come.
Read the full review
Elleke will be in conversation with Diya Gupta and Barbara Gallego Larrarte about her creative writing work at the ‘English: Shared Futures’ conference in Newcastle in July 2017, organised by The English Association, University English (the body for HE Departments of English) and the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE), with support from the Institute of English Studies and the Higher Education Academy.
Jeffrey N. Cox includes a short synopsis of Indian Arrivals in his article “Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century” in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 56/4 (2016). He observes:
Boehmer discovers in the writings of these figures a poetics of arrival and uncovers the ways in which these travelers from India changed the culture of their new home.
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Newly published in the Sydney Review of Books:
This conversation between Elleke Boehmer and Meg Samuelson began in a book-talk seminar hosted by the Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town on 15 September 2015 and continued across subsequent months of travel and exchange between three countries, Britain, South Africa and Australia. The conversation tacks between two award-winning books by Boehmer, the cultural history Indian Arrivals, 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire (Oxford UP, 2015) and the novel The Shouting in the Dark (Jacana; Sandstone, 2015). Together Boehmer and Samuelson draw out the unexpected resonances discovered in a study of Indian arrivals in London from the opening of the Suez Canal to the first world war, and a novel set in South Africa after the second world war, and consider how writing and shipboard yarns weave these worlds together.
Read the whole conversation
In this talk, Elleke Boehmer explores how we might turn to literature and art to find ways of describing ourselves, and what kinds of art encourage such identification.
On Friday 24 February, Elleke Boehmer will read from The Shouting in the Dark as part of an English and Creative Writing Seminar at the University of Adelaide.
All are welcome.
In this masterclass, Elleke Boehmer will examine how we conceptualise the relationship between writing and criticism in the works of writers who practice both. Are metaphors such as conversation, exchange or interface at all helpful? In times when more creative writers than ever before are working in academic departments of literature, but at the same time writers and critics are distancing themselves from the notion of ‘critique’, has this relationship become closer or simply more ambiguous? And is the ambiguity in any way stimulating for the core work that makes us writers?
RSVP by 21 February 2017
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