Postcolonial Poetics is about how we read postcolonial and world literatures today, and about how the structures of that writing shape our reading. The book’s eight chapters explore the ways in which postcolonial writing in English from various 21st-century contexts, including southern and West Africa, and Black and Asian Britain, interacts with our imaginative understanding of the world. Throughout, the focus is on reading practices, where reading is taken as an inventive, border-traversing activity, one that postcolonial writing with its interests in margins, intersections, subversions, and crossings specifically encourages. This close, sustained focus on reading, reception, and literariness is an outstanding feature of the study, as is its wide generic range, embracing poetry, essays, and life-writing, as well as fiction. The field-defining scholar Elleke Boehmer holds that literature has the capacity to keep reimagining and refreshing how we understand ourselves in relation to the world and to some of the most pressing questions of our time, including resistance, reconciliation, survival after terror, and migration.

Responding to calls to focus on postcolonial literature's literary qualities instead of merely its political content, this volume investigates the idiosyncrasies of postcolonial poetics. However, rather than privileging the literary at the expense of the political, the essays collected here analyze how texts use genre and form to offer multiple and distinct ways of responding to political and historical questions. By probing how different kinds of literary writing can blur with other discourses, the contributors offer key insights into postcolonial literature's power to imagine alternative identities and societies.

This book examines tragedy and tragic philosophy from the Greeks through Shakespeare to the present day. It explores key themes in the links between suffering and ethics through postcolonial literature. Ato Quayson reconceives how we think of World literature under the singular and fertile rubric of tragedy. He draws from many key works – Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes, Medea, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear – to establish the main contours of tragedy. Quayson uses Shakespeare's Othello, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Tayeb Salih, Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee to qualify and expand the purview and terms by which Western tragedy has long been understood. Drawing on key texts such as The Poetics and The Nicomachean Ethics, and augmenting them with Frantz Fanon and the Akan concept of musuo (taboo), Quayson formulates a supple, insightful new theory of ethical choice and the impediments against it. This is a major book from a leading critic in literary studies.

Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature reveals an intriguing history of relationships among poets and editors from Ireland and Nigeria, as well as Britain and the Caribbean, during the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonization. The book explores what such leading anglophone poets as Seamus Heaney, Christopher Okigbo, and Derek Walcott had in common: 'peripheral' origins and a desire to address transnational publics without expatriating themselves. The book reconstructs how they gained the imprimatur of both local and London-based cultural institutions. It shows, furthermore, how political crises challenged them to reconsider their poetry's publics. Making substantial use of unpublished archival material, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma examines poems in print, often the pages on which they first appeared, in order to chart the transformation of the anglophone literary world. He argues that these poets' achievements cannot be extricated from the transnational networks through which their poems circulated - and which they in turn remade.

Examining a range of contemporary Anglophone texts, this book opens up postcolonial and transcultural studies for discussions of visuality and vision. It argues that the preoccupation with visual practices in Anglophone literatures addresses the power of images, vision and visual aesthetics to regulate cultural visibility and modes of identification in an unevenly structured world. The representation of visual practices in the imaginative realm of fiction opens up a zone in which established orders of the sayable and visible may be revised and transformed. In 12 chapters, the book examines narrative fiction by writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, David Dabydeen and NoViolet Bulawayo, who employ word-image relations to explore the historically fraught links between visual practices and the experience of modernity in a transcultural context. Against this conceptual background, the examination of verbal-visual relations will illustrate how Anglophone fiction models alternative modes of re-presentation that reflect critically on hegemonic visual regimes and reach out for new, more pluralized forms of exchange.

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series (general editor: Elleke Boehmer) offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. Postcolonial Poetry in English provides a comprehensive introduction to the development of English poetry in all the regions that were once part of the British Empire. The idea of postcolonial poetry is held together by three factors: the global community constituted by English; the creative possibilities accessible through English; and patterns of literary development common to regions with a history of recent decolonization. In showing how diverse poetic traditions in English evolved from dependency to varying degrees of cultural self-confidence, the book answers two broad questions: how is postcolonial studies relevant to the interpretation of poetry, and how does poetry contribute to our idea of postcolonial writing? The book is divided into three parts: the first works out a method of analysis based on recent publications of outstanding interest; the second narrates the development of poetic traditions in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, and the settler colonies of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand; the third analyses key motifs, such as the struggle for minority self-representation; the cultural politics of gender, modernism, and postmodernity; and the experience of migration and self-exile in contemporary Anglophone societies. Postcolonial Poetry in English provides a succinct and wide-ranging introduction to some of the most exciting poetic writing of the twentieth century. It is ideally suited for readers interested in world writing in English, contemporary literature, postcolonial writing, cultural studies, and postmodern culture.

Critics have argued that the field of postcolonial studies has become melancholic due to its institutionalization in recent years. This book identifies some limits of postcolonial studies and suggests ways of coming to terms with this issue via a renewed engagement with the literary dimension in the postcolonial text.