Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form (review)

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). Françoise 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, subject-hood, voice, and collective experience, the book’s chapters span the colonial and post-colonial periods and bring together discussions of half-forgotten authors such as Évariste 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.