Postcolonial Poetics: A Book at Lunchtime

A Book at Lunchtime seminar with Elleke Boehmer, author of
Postcolonial Poetics, joined by Dr Malachi McIntosh, Professor Ben
Morgan, Professor Richard Drayton and Professor Robert Young
(chair). 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.
About the author Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in
English at the University of Oxford, UK, and a founding figure in
the field of colonial and postcolonial literary studies. She is the
author, editor, or co-editor of over twenty books, including
monographs and novels. Her monographs include Colonial and
Postcolonial Literature (1995/2005), Stories of Women (2005), and
Indian Arrivals (winner of the ESSE 2015-16 Prize). Her novels
include The Shouting in the Dark (2015) and Screens Against the Sky
(1990). About the panel Dr Malachi McIntosh (Runnymede Trust)
Professor Ben Morgan (Worcester College, Oxford) Professor Richard
Drayton (King's College London) Professor Robert Young (NYU)