Elleke Boehmer will participate in the Further South roundtable at the University of Adelaide with Prof. Stephen Muecke, Dr Emma McEwin, Dr Meg Samuelson, and Prof. Anthony Uhlmann, chaired by Prof. Nicholas Jose.
Hosted by the Department of English and Creative Writing, the Further South Roundtable is an opportunity to follow up issues raised at last November’s event ‘Cultural Musing: The South’.
Máire Ní Fhlathúin’s review of Indian Arrivals, published in 2016 in The Review of English Studies has just come to our attention. The piece contains high praise for the book:
This book, [Boehmer’s] most imaginatively wrought to date, is evidence of a critic working at the height of her ability, capable of bringing together the large-scale changes of history as well as dwelling on the fascinating details and connections that light up the networks she describes.
Prof. Kate McLoughlin (Oxford) has written a blog post on a memorable scene in The Shouting in the Dark for the TORCH blog:
The scene that stays with me from The Shouting in the Dark, her most recent novel, is one in which the young female protagonist, Ella, is out for a Sunday walk with her parents and their dog in the pine plantations above Braemar, near Durban.
Prof. McLoughlin is the convener of the Post-War: Commemoration, Reconstruction, Reconciliation Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Series.
Anika van de Wijngaard has written an article (in Dutch) in the Leidsch Dagblad about Elleke’s ‘Indische Letterenlezing’ on 22 September.
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.
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.
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.
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.