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  • Literary Form as Postcolonial Critique by Katherine Burkitt
  • Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt
Katherine Burkitt. Literary Form as Postcolonial Critique. Surrey: Ashgate, 2012. 162p.

The conflict between form and content in literary productions is based on a clash of civilizations, nations and their narrations, and their fragmented geopolitical locations. In that vein, Katherine Burkitt’s monograph, Literary Form as Postcolonial Critique attempts to focus on narrative poems and verse novels to examine the various modes of postmodern and postcolonial ruptures and their inherent textual politics that such textual fragmentations produce on the cultural literary landscape.

This book in particular challenges the structure of the genre of the prose novel, poetry and epics, and as a result disrupts the expectations that readers may have from these genres. Burkitt’s central argument rests on the premise that the texts and the worlds they represent are inseparable and taken together often exhibit an “uncomfortable harmony as aesthetics and politics become interwoven” (“Introduction”). Burke marks these texts as “literary misfits that make for uncomfortable reading.” Specifically, Burke is referring to Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990), Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune (1998), Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998), and Bernadine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe (2001).

This argument of disjuncture between the form, content and the worlds they attempt to represent is neither new, nor particularly postcolonial, and Burkitt doesn’t claim any groundbreaking interrogation with these old paradigms. Rather, she carefully unpacks narratives that demonstrate the numerous ways in which this “uncomfortable harmony” reveals the inherent textual politics that marks the complexity of reading race, gender and sexual politics, and power dynamics within a (post)colonial framework. [End Page 209]

A strong first chapter is a lengthy rendition of Les Murray’s 1998 novel Fredy Neptune. Burkitt classifies this novel as “post epic” with a global perspective and although Fred is “frequently away from home, Fredy Neptune is marked by a series of Odyssean homecomings. . .” (33). Burkitt specifically explores Fred’s “Boeotian” identity, an identity that is both hybrid and devoid of any authentic self, and examines memory fragmentation and its impact on textual representations. I found Burkitt’s exploration of poetry and responsibility quite sharp in terms of unpacking the various modes of narrative and histographic discontinuities, although the critique is more aligned to a post structural than a postcolonial reading. The novel, however, becomes a postcolonial critique when it begins to dissect the hierarchical relationships based on the history of colonization in Australia. In Murray’s work these various modes of colonial conflicts are present within the binary representations of urban versus rural, insider versus outsider, prose and poetry, and finally a split between the West and Australia.

In her second chapter, “Post-epic National Identities in Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe, Burkitt shifts her focus to the genre of the “post-epic.” In this 2001 novel, a narrative written completely in verse form, The Emperor’s Babe insists on a postcolonial presence within this British history as a result of the presence of black people in Roman London. Although Evaristo’s text, according to Burkitt, makes the relationship with the poetic form and the various perspectives embedded in Zuleika’s own poetry, and, in particular, her first sexual encounter with the emperor (and the power dynamics implied) clear, the postcolonial relationship remains unclear. Based on Burkitt’s central argument that juxtaposes the play between literary form and content and as Burkitt herself posits, “The Emperor’s Babe’s epic form is recast to provide a marginal space and a voice for the voiceless in British society- both contemporary and historicized,” (70) the analysis could have gained more agency if the links between the historical realities of Roman Londinium in 211 A.D. (during the reign of a black African emperor Septimus Serevus) and contemporary London and the British society were elaborated. Zuleika, the teenage mistress to the Roman emperor is clearly a proto-feminist subject, and an elaborated Black feminist consciousness which she inhabits, could have added to Zuleika’s growing sense of her feminine agency. What is compelling about this chapter is the recognition that The Emperor’s Babe is “inherently postmodern . . . And takes advantage of...

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