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  • The Transnational Word:Poetry's World of Influences
  • Kelwyn Sole (bio)
Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. xvii + 221 pp. $29.00.

For at least half a century literary critics have struggled to find an underpinning descriptive discourse and theory (or set of theories) adequate to the examination of literature emanating from previously colonized countries and their marginalized communities, as well as for individual writers from these countries who now live in the metropolitan centers of Europe and North America. In turn, "commonwealth," "world," and "postcolonial" literature have received attention and discussion. Jahan Ramazani's A Transnational Poetics attempts to flesh out the lineaments of a poetics that can adequately respond to the present focus on the "transnational," a relatively recent addition to the terms that seek to define this area of study.

The strengths and weaknesses of the "transnational" as a descriptive and theoretical category can best be seen in practice. This is precisely what Ramazani here seeks to accomplish, as he emphasizes the value of the "transnational" as a descriptive and interrogative term for much poetry during and after modernism:

How would modern and contemporary poetry studies in English—an area now largely subdivided along national lines—look if this transnationalism were taken to be primary rather than incidental? … [W]hat are the methodological and even political implications of reshaping a humanistic [End Page 175] subdiscipline to reflect the intercultural energies and mobilities of cross-national literary citizenship? … [M]y hope is …[to] advance the field beyond theoretical and piecemeal acknowledgment of this cross-culturalism to a more thoroughgoing internationalization of its disciplinary practices.

(24)

As its author notes, this project impinges on a number of sub-categories in current literary scholarship, including modernist and American literary studies, as well as black Atlantic and postcolonial studies: "it proposes various ways of vivifying circuits of poetic connection and dialogue across political and geographic borders and even hemispheres, of examining cross-cultural and cross-national exchanges, influences, and confluences in poetry," using in this process "a variety of transnational templates—globalization, migration, travel, genre, influence, modernity, decolonization, and diaspora" (x–xi). In pursuit of this goal, Ramazani employs a range of theorists (Edward Said and James Clifford are especially noticeable, while the concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia are also used—more controversially, given Mikhail Bakhtin's distinctions between the discourses of the novel and poetry). On a more immediate level, he strives to map out how selected individual poets confound regional, national, and even continental boundaries, "forg[ing] alliances of style and sensibility across vast distances of geography, history, and culture" (24).

The first two chapters examine the manner in which a number of writers have been affected by, and have recast, globalization in their poems, drawing out the consequences of their interstitial and cross-national imagining on a series of levels—formal, historical, and disciplinary. The third chapter looks at poetry in the light of "traveling theory" and highlights both the formal and imaginative devices and information technologies that allow poets to leap national and cultural boundaries in their work, while demonstrating the ways in which poems become contact zones of "migrat[ory] and mingling tropes, geographies, and cultural signifiers" (54). The fourth puts forward Ramazani's belief that no generic study of a literary work can dispense with interculturality and transnationality, focusing on elegy and the poetry [End Page 176] of mourning to show that even a genre that seems to be circumscribed nationally and historically partakes in wider currents of influence and gesture. This chapter is followed by one exploring the connections and discrepancies between Western modernism and what Ramazani calls "the poetry of the global South" (xii), which suggests that postcolonial poets, rather than rebuffing this modernism, use and remodel some of its formal techniques in order to serve their own expressive ends, especially hybridity. Taking this further, the next chapter sketches out how postcolonial poets have responded to the technology and themes of the modernizing and globalizing West. The seventh chapter shows how the experiences of decolonization have affected postcolonial poetry across the globe, formally and thematically—arguing, à la Said, for more complex notions of affiliation than are...

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