Postcolonial Poetics Archives – Elleke Boehmer

Homi Bhabha reviews Postcolonial Poetics

Erica — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 08:12:33 +0000

Homi Bhabha has reviewed Postcolonial Poetics for Critical Inquiry. Some highlights include:

It is difficult to do justice, in a brief review, to a book as detailed and deliberative as Postcolonial Poetics. Elleke Boehmer’s literary readings range across diverse literatures, many identified with the global south, but almost all of them breaking the bounds of cultural containment while crossing the limits of sovereign territorial borders. [. . .] The score of a work––its range of voices, its tonal transformations, its mediations of mobility, its orchestration of cultural signs and political dissonances––far exceeds its adherence to any ideological or political core.

And:

Boehmer is a distinguished novelist and poet. From her subtle writing we learn the virtue of waiting and watching for the story to appear in its own time. Boehmer’s poetics generate their own warmth and weather, and her gift lies in her ability to allow works of literature to bear fruit in the seasons of their becoming.

Read the full review

The post Homi Bhabha reviews Postcolonial Poetics appeared first on Elleke Boehmer.

New review of Postcolonial Poetics in the THE

Erica — Fri, 29 Mar 2019 14:45:26 +0000

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.

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Review of Postcolonial Poetics on LitNet

Erica — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 07:57:30 +0000

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.

Read the full review

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Postcolonial Poetics out now as an eBook!

Erica — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 12:19:44 +0000

Elleke Boehmer’s newest book of criticism, Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings, is out now as an eBook with Palgrave Macmillan. The hardcover will be published in September 2018.