Elleke Boehmer will give a master class and lecture on “Postcolonial Poetics and Decolonizing the Academy” at the University of Amsterdam in May.
This event takes the form of, firstly, a 2-hour masterclass led by Elleke Boehmer, aimed mainly at graduate students, focusing on the issues raised in the introduction and first chapter of Postcolonial Poetics, including the question of how to bring together the political and the aesthetic qualities of postcolonial writing. Secondly, Professor Boehmer will give a 1-hour lecture (including time for questions) under the title ‘We Need to Talk about Decolonization (again)’. This lecture will build on topics touched upon in Postcolonial Poetics to explore the pressing question of the state of decolonization in the contemporary academy.
Jenni Ramone has written a glowing review of Postcolonial Poetics in the Times Higher Education supplement.
A couple of highlights:
Elleke Boehmer’s Postcolonial Poetics invites us to be fearless readers. She wants us to enjoy the process of allowing the text to “mould, shape, and reshape our understanding”. This, driven by readings of prominent novelists (Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, J. M. Coetzee, Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie) alongside essayists, poets and short story writers (Warsan Shire, Mongane Serote, M. NourbeSe Philip), makes for a liberating reading experience. Positioned as alert readers, we are reminded that, in order to learn from postcolonial texts, we don’t have to do intrusive things to them. Instead, Postcolonial Poetics offers strategies to reconnect with the surface aesthetics – textual patterns and flows, discontinuities and wit – that are particular features of postcolonial writing.
Boehmer’s book is … a vindication of postcolonial studies and of the potential of postcolonial literature to change the world. She agrees with Okri’s suggestion that the writer’s task is to remake the world, and sees the potential of the reader to activate the work’s resistant power.
In more exciting news for 2019, Elleke Boehmer’s new collection of short stories will be published by Myriad later this year.
These assured, accomplished stories are reports from a world in which unacknowledged dark energies undermine and render hollow our bright, rational self-understanding. With passion and intelligence, and rare moral insight, Elleke Boehmer traces the scars left on the psyche by the tortuous histories of the South.
We are very excited to announce that the Australian edition of The Shouting in the Dark will be published by UWA Publishing in February 2019 as The Shouting in the Dark & other southern writing.
Besides the beautiful new cover, readers can expect some exciting additions in this edition of the novel:
The Shouting in the Dark is Ella’s story of surviving childhood and mapping new belonging. This Australian edition includes a new preface by the author, an interview that sets the book in relation to other stories of migration in the south, and selected writing by Elleke Boehmer about living in, navigating, and gravitating back to the southern hemisphere.
Elleke will be at the Perth Writers’ Festival on 24 February 2019, promoting the Australian edition of The Shouting in the Dark, and other southern writing. She will talk to Jane Cornes Maclean about the legacies of colonialism and how an individual can find their place in the world. All welcome.
A new review of Postcolonial Poetics by Karina Magdalena Szczurek has been published in LitNet. Szczurek praises the book for its “intriguing approach to understanding our relationship to postcolonial literature as readers”. She continues:
Throughout Postcolonial poetics, Boehmer’s careful examination of “reading” practices allows for not only a deeper understanding of the formal, aesthetic dimension of postcolonial writing, but our role as readers in decoding and experiencing a text. It constitutes an invigorating relocation of attention in postcolonial studies.
A new short story, entitled “Evelina”, has been published in the Australia-based Mascara Literary Review. The story offers a glimpse into Elleke’s upcoming short story collection, South, North, which will be published in 2019.
The Australian edition of The Shouting in the Dark will come out from UWAP in early 2019.
Elleke Boehmer will launch her latest book of criticism, Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings, on 29 October 2018 at St John’s College Auditorium in Oxford.
Terence Cave, Hélène Neveu Kringelbach, J. C. Niala and Marina Warner will offer brief comments, chaired by Lloyd Pratt.
Elleke Boehmer will publish a new collection of short stories, entitled South, North, with Myriad in 2019.
From Myriad’s press release:
South, North by Elleke Boehmer is a collection of short stories that track lives across continents from the perspective of the southern hemisphere. An African student in England longs for her desert home; a shy Argentine travel agent agonises about joining her boyfriend in New York; a soldier is haunted by his past; a writer’s widow fends off the attentions of his predatory biographer. […][Publishing Director Candida] Lacey bought world rights in South, North directly from the author; Myriad will publish in October 2019.
