Intro; Acknowledgements; Contents; Chapter 1: Postcolonial Poetics-A Score for Reading; Reading Practices; Chapter Outline; Chapter 2: Questions of Postcolonial Poetics; Postcolonial Issues and Debates: Writing with Design; An Analytic of the Beautiful; Postcolonial Pragmatics; Chapter 3: Revisiting Resistance Literature-Writing in Juxtaposition; Resistance Literature and Writing Back; Juxtaposition Effects; Mobilizing Reciprocity: Nelson Mandela as a Resistant Reader; Chapter 4: Postcolonial Writing, Terror, and Continuity: Okri, D'Aguiar, NourbeSe Philip, Shire.
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Achebe-Haunting: ConclusionsChapter 7: Concepts of Exchange-Poetics in Postcolonial, World, and World-Systems Literatures; World Literature and Postcolonial Criticism; Convergent Approaches: Postcolonialism from the 1980s; World Literature, World-Literature, and Postcolonial Remains; North-East Passages: Reading Black Mamba Boy; Chapter 8: The Transformative Force of the Postcolonial Line: Protest Poetry and the Global Short Story; 'Simultaneous, Constantly Changing Effects': Contestatory Poetics; Black Witnessing and the 'Joy-Parts'; Shared Story Worlds; Works Cited; Chapter 1; Chapter 2.
Terror, the Dark Reverse of the GlobalOn and Beyond Moments of Danger: Readings; Close; Chapter 5: Repetitive Poetics-When Crisis Defines a Nation's Writing. Contemporary South African Novels; Post-apartheid Writing: Repeating Trauma; The 'Frozen Penultimate' and After: Narrative Impacts; Repetition, Identification, and Marking Time: Coovadia and Mzobe; Conclusions: Interpretative Yield; Chapter 6: Poetics and Persistence: Chinua Achebe's Shaping Influence; Nigerian and Global; Achebe's Generative Poetics; Precursor and Inheritors: Achebe and Okri, Evans, Oyeyemi, Adichie.
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SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
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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.