Postcolonial literature has often tended to invite readings that focus on the relation between texts and political contexts, not surprisingly perhaps, given the fraught historical moments of colonialism and decolonisation with which it frequently engages. Nevertheless, critics such as Nicholas Harrison have argued for attention to the literary as literary, and have explored the ways in which literary representation makes any assumed ideological content necessarily indeterminate. Taking into account this call for attention to the literary, this volume investigates more specifically the idiosyncrasies of postcolonial poetics, including postcolonial literature's use of and experimentation with genre and form. However, this attention to poetics is not intended to replace political engagement, and, rather than privileging the literary at the expense of the political, this volume analyses how texts use genre and form to offer multiple distinct ways of responding to political and
historical questions. Postcolonial texts engage with the political world in a variety of ways, directly or indirectly, and it is in their specific uses of genre and form that they alter or develop our understanding of the particular contexts with which they grapple. According to Graham Huggan, postcolonial studies is inherently plural and interdisciplinary, in that it is made up of literary and cultural analysis as well as political theory, psychoanalysis, anthropology, history and philosophy. It is in the combination and manipulation of such forms of analysis that postcolonialism is able to imagine alternative identities and societies. This volume of postcolonial poetics therefore probes some examples of different kinds of literary writing, its blurring with other discourses and its manipulation of genre and form, in order to achieve a better understanding of its transformatory power.This exploration of the poetics of genre also sheds light on how different kinds of texts offer
specific, distinct modes of thought.
Industry Reviews
Since its institutionalization, postcolonial studies has increasingly engaged with the conditions of possibility for radical critique, with the need for an aesthetic inflection of engagement being highlighted in recent years by writers such as Eli Sorenson and Nicholas Harrison. These critics suggest the tendency of postcolonial critique to overlook aesthetic practices in its concern to locate the historical and political implications of representation. Seeking to redress the balance, the contributors to Postcolonial Poetics take form and genre as their starting point and assert the potential of aesthetic analysis to open out understandings of the significance of postcolonial experiences. In her introduction, Jane Hiddelston explains that the 'poetics' of the book's title implies not the delineation of a coherent formal practice qualifying as 'postcolonial', but rather the stress in each chapter on diversity, ambivalence, and irresolution; a poetics that mutually enables the complexity of the postcolonial condition and 'encourage[s] readers to think differently' (p. 2). Franc,oise Lionnet's chapter invokes the 'politics of form' (p. 13), and this phrase serves to characterize how the various contributors' consideration of form reflects on the function of literature for the postcolonial context and how formal analyses invite a more diverse conception of political inscription. Reapproaching from an aesthetic angle concerns with postcolonial memory, subjecthood, voice, and collective experience, the book's chapters span the colonial and postcolonial periods and bring together discussions of half-forgotten authors such as E' variste de Parny (Lionnet), those of more well-remembered figures such as Albert Camus (Andy Stafford) and Kateb Yacine (Mireille Calle-Gruber), as well as contemporaries such as Assia Djebar (Patrick Crowley, Clarisse Zimra) and Patrick Chamoiseau (Louise Hardwick). While the Francophone situation predominates, this emphasis is often repositioned on a wider horizon, as Harrison places his reading of Joseph Conrad's Congo in dialogue with Freud, Elleke Boehmer discusses J. M. Coetzee's 'Australian realism', and Matthias Zach re-evaluates Edward Said's readings of Goethe. The lines of aesthetic enquiry broached face head-on the question of whether a properly 'postcolonial' field of literature - existing in tension with the Western canon - can provide the basis for 'postcolonial cultural resistance' (p. 131). The contributors disavow any transparent link between formal experimentation and political resistance, and together the chapters move towards an intricate understanding of the dissonances that define the postcolonial experience. Challenging the limits of both the post-structuralist and postcolonial methodological terrains, the contributions invite reconsideration of these critical fields, inflecting the first with postcolonial historicist awareness while placing aesthetic enquiry at the heart of postcolonial representational analysis. The effect is to nuance questions regarding exchange between Western traditions of aesthetic experimentation and the postcolonial reconfiguration of such traditions, and throughout the chapters, the diminution of universalist perspectives through the play of the text is invoked. As much as these chapters discuss other texts, they are in themselves rigorous critical engagements with what it means to write postcolonial criticism, with 'How to speak about it?', as Calle-Gruber says (p. 147). As such, this book will provide a key reference point for researchers embarking on analyses of postcolonial cultural production. ... this book will provide a key reference point for researchers embarking on analyses of postcolonial cultural production.
