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.