A Transnational Poetics (review)

Studies in modernism continue to complicate and redraw the horizons of a period once characterized by a few monolithic and Eurocentric literary histories. Jahan Ramazani's new book, A Transnational Poetics, neither dismisses nor rehearses such well-known accounts of the era. Rather, Ramazani seeks to historicize the porous and multi-directional channels between Euromodernism and postcolonial poetry, fashioning new approaches to some usual suspects—most notably T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and W.B. Yeats—and laying historical and critical groundwork for important, but otherwise ignored, "Third World" poets such as Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, Okot p' Bitek, and Louise Bennett.

The first two chapters draw on work by Arjun Appardurai, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and others to argue that too often modernist and postcolonial literature is read through a "monolithic orientalist epistemology closed to alterities within and without, or [seen as] a self-contained civilizational unit in perpetual conflict with others" (12). The third and fourth chapters are thematically directed, focusing on "traveling poetry" and the "poetry of mourning," using these tropics to cut across and between East/West and North/South hemispheres. The second half of the book pivots toward the latter, though often recalling the thematic anxieties and technical features of the Anglophone avant-garde. The final chapter returns to London to theorize the ways in which black British poetry fashions a "translocal" re-imagining of the imperial center.

Ramazani explores those terms that mark the common and sometimes elusive capital of literary scholarship—including "postcoloniality," "hybridity," "migration," and "diaspora"—to reflect on the way in which these categories both enable and, in some cases, inhibit a rethinking of modernism within a larger global framework. The book's ultimate bane and boon is its oscillation between theory and practice; neither a wide theory of modernism and modernity, nor a specifically developed historical study, readers seeking either one or the other will, perhaps, be disappointed, since the book seems as concerned with refining and complicating critical habits of reading as it does with building a case for transnational histories. Revisiting Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia, Ramazani focuses on a poetics of "enmeshment," a keyword of this study, to think about the way texts encode and generate relationships across and between the very borders that have come to demarcate "the West" from "the Rest." So, Ramazani presses, how might the field change if "the nationalities and ethnicities of poets and poems…were genuinely regarded as hybrid, interstitial, and fluid imaginative constructs?" (24). National and generic categorizations might function as starting points for each of Ramazani's chapters, but A Transnational Poetics consistently rewrites the very critical frames that have come to naturalize these starting points. For Ramazani, enmeshment means contending with both the "roots" and "routes" that become, literally and metaphorically, threaded throughout a text both in terms of production and critical reception.

Questioning the tentative and interstitial relationship between the local and the global, Ramazani invokes the famed Homeric line from Walcott's "The Schooner Flight," Shabine's incantatory "I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation." Pointing out that in a critical framework which positions and interprets writers through the lens of nationality and ethnicity, such categories often fail to capture fully the way Shabine's particular nobody "contains multitudes," Ramazani situates Shabine in a much larger tropics of literary history. A Transnational Poetics frequently examines how many postcolonial writers claim, indigenize, and ironically "make new" the very aesthetic programs which have otherwise seemed part and parcel of colonial conquest.

Ramazani revels in "geopolitical discrepancies," both within the texts he reads as well as through the texts he compares, moving seamlessly between Les Murray's "The Powerline Incarnation" to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." He also considers how West Indian writers like Kamau Brathwaite developed and harnessed local speech rhythms ironically "through the detour of none other than T.S. Eliot's voice transmitted...