A Transnational Poetics (review)

Jahan Ramazani's A Transnational Poetics takes up the author's own call, issued in his previous book, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English, to "hybridize our canons of modern and contemporary poetry in English, giving due space in our courses, personal libraries, and anthologies to Third World poets" (The Hybrid Muse 183). In this more recent book, Ramazani extends and develops the case for a hybridized canon and, perhaps more importantly, argues for a reassessment of modern and contemporary poetry that accounts for the several ways that poetic form, style, and influence defy national and cultural boundaries. In chapters such as "Modernist Bricolage, Postcolonial Hybridity," "Poetry and Decolonization," and "Poetry and the Translocal: Blackening Britain," A Transnational Poetics moves freely between the works of a variety of poets writing in English, among them T. S. Eliot, Kamau Brathwaite, Bernardine Evaristo, A. K. Ramanujan, W. B. Yeats, and Wole Soyinka. The book's rapid leaps from text to text, continent to continent, hemisphere to hemisphere seem designed to enact as well as discuss Ramazani's argument that cross-cultural interaction is evident in a great range of poetic texts, even those that other critics, and often the poets themselves, have argued exemplify discrete national literatures.

A Transnational Poetics aims at more than a readjustment of the curricula of English departments. The book's investigation of the intersections of the poetries of Africa, the United Kingdom, South Asia, the Caribbean, and the United States implies a rejection of what Ramazani appears to believe are corrosive forms of nationalism that artificially cordon off the people and cultures of different nations and regions along with the literatures they create. Ramazani makes a convincing case for the integral part poetry plays in the negotiation of the cultural exchanges that result from colonialism, migration, and global commerce. Poetry's compactness and parataxis make it better suited to "the imaginative enactment of geographic displacement" (52) than are other literary genres, especially those that, like the novel, often attempt to place the reader within a stable locale. Among the book's greatest strengths is this argument for poetry's usefulness in making sense of and at times resisting globalization. Ramazani's argument here significantly raises the stakes of literary scholarship, involving the study of poetry in the necessary work of untangling the complexities of globalized society. Through an examination of how postcolonial poets "postcolonize Euromodernism and Euromodernize the post-colonial" (108), how, for instance, Kamau Brathwaite adapts T. S. Eliot's modernism to assist in the project of freeing Caribbean verse from British influence, scholars might come to an understanding of similar examples of cultural hybridity and resistance in other facets of contemporary life. Ramazani's discussion of hybridity seems designed to highlight the degree to which intercultural exchange and dialogue does not make Brathwaite, for instance, a consumer or passive victim of colonial influence, but an active participant in the "naming and renaming" (142) of local and global space and experience.

A Transnational Poetics attempts to open a field, to provide a basis for scholarship that transcends "the mononational paradigm" of most English departments (28). Such studies can tend toward breadth rather than depth, and many of the topics and poets Ramazani's book covers deserve more thorough coverage. Ramazani's placement of much postcolonial poetry in the category of modernism, for instance, demands further exploration, despite Ramazani's nuanced argument for this categorization. Despite Ramazani's acknowledgement of their varied uses of modernist techniques, to locate Wole Soyinka and A. K. Ramanujan in modernism seems to collapse a variety of experiences of differing modernities into a single literary movement. Further scholarship seems necessary to fully differentiate the Soyinka's and Ramanujan's of the world from those Euromodernists who form part of their literary background. Far from true weaknesses in Ramazani's book, these minor gaps should be seen as openings that A Transnational Poetics has created for later readers to enter.