A Transnational Poetics (review)

Abstract

Ramazani, Jahan. 2009. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. $29 he. XVM + 221 pp.Studies in modernism continue to complicate and redraw horizons of a period once characterized by a few and Eurocentric literary histories. Jahan Ramazani's book, A Transnational Poetics, neither dismisses nor rehearses such well-known accounts of era. Rather, Ramazani seeks to historicize porous and multi-directional channels between Euromodernism and postcolonial poetry, fashioning approaches to some usual suspects - most notablyT.S. Eliot, W.H.Auden, and W.B.Yeats - and laying historical and critical groundwork for important, but otherwise ignored, Third World poets such as Christopher Okigbo, WoIe Soyinka, Okot p' Bitek, and Louise Bennett.The first two chapters draw on work by Arjun Appardurai, Kwanie Anthony Appiah, and to argue that too often modernist and postcolonial literature is read through a monolithic orientalist epistemology closed to alterities within and without, or [seen as] a self-contained civilizational unit in perpetual conflict with others (12). third and fourth chapters are thematically directed, focusing on traveling and of mourning, using these tropics to cut across and between East/West and North/South hemispheres. second half of book pivots toward latter, though often recalling thematic anxieties and technical features of Anglophone avant-garde. final chapter returns to London to theorize ways in which black British poetry fashions a translocal re-imagining of imperial center.Ramazani explores those terms that mark common and sometimes elusive capital of literary scholarship - including postcoloniality, hybridity, migration, and diaspora - to reflect on way in which these categories both enable and, in some cases, inhibit a rethinking of modernism within a larger global framework. book's ultimate bane and boon is its oscillation between theory and practice; neither a wide theory of modernism and modernity, nor a specifically developed historical study, readers seeking either one or other will, perhaps, be disappointed, since book seems as concerned with refining and complicating critical habits of reading as it does with building a case for transnational histories. Revisiting Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia, Ramazani focuses on a poetics of enmeshment, a keyword of this study, to think about way texts encode and generate relationships across and between very borders that have come to demarcate the West from the Rest. So, Ramazani presses, how might field change if the nationalities and ethnicities of poets and poems... were genuinely regarded as hybrid, interstitial, and fluid imaginative constructs? (24). National and generic categorizations might function as starting points for each of Ramazani's chapters, but A Transnational Poetici consistently rewrites very critical frames that have come to naturalize these starting points. For Ramazani, enmeshment means contending with both roots and routes that become, literally and metaphorically, threaded throughout a text both in terms of production and critical reception.Questioning tentative and interstitial relationship between local and global, Ramazani invokes famed Homeric line from Walcott's The Schooner Flight Shabine's incantatory I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation. Pointing out that in a critical framework which positions and interprets writers through lens of nationality and ethnicity, such categories often fail to capture fully way Shabine's particular nobody contains multitudes, Ramazani situates Shabine in a much larger tropics of literary history. A Transnational Poetics frequently examines how many postcolonial writers claim, indigenize, and ironically make new very aesthetic programs which have otherwise seemed part and parcel of colonial conquest. …