1. Postcolonial poetics—a score for reading.- 2. Questions of postcolonial poetics.- 3. Revisiting Resistance literature—writing in juxtaposition.- 4. Postcolonial writing, terror, and continuity: Okri, D’Aguiar, NourbeSe Philip, Shire.- 5. Repetitive poetics—when crisis defines a nation’s writing. Contemporary South African novels.- 6. Poetics and persistence: Chinua Achebe’s shaping influence.- 7. Concepts of exchange—poetics in postcolonial, world, and world-system literatures.- 8. The transformative force of the postcolonial line: protest poetry and the global short story.

Postcolonial Poetics is about how we read postcolonial and world literatures today, and about how the structures of that writing shape our reading. The book’s eight chapters explore the ways in which postcolonial writing in English from various 21st-century contexts, including southern and West Africa, and Black and Asian Britain, interacts with our imaginative understanding of the world. Throughout, the focus is on reading practices, where reading is taken as an inventive, border-traversing activity, one that postcolonial writing with its interests in margins, intersections, subversions, and crossings specifically encourages. This close, sustained focus on reading, reception, and literariness is an outstanding feature of the study, as is its wide generic range, embracing poetry, essays, and life-writing, as well as fiction. The field-defining scholar Elleke Boehmer holds that literature has the capacity to keep reimagining and refreshing how we understand ourselves in relation to the world and to some of the most pressing questions of our time, including resistance, reconciliation, survival after terror, and migration.

“The book is valuable enough for reminding postcolonial literary critics not to neglect the how of writing and of reading, especially with regard to how postcolonial writing influences its readers’ social, political, and ethical sensibilities. … it is a welcome and timely reminder for postcolonial literary critics to not neglect the literary aspect of their research.” (Edward Powell, The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, Vol. 27 (1), December 23, 2019)“Boehmer’s book is, nevertheless, a vindication of postcolonial studies and of the potential of postcolonial literature to change the world. … Boehmer’s instruction to pay attention to the text’s formal and expressive meanings is a strategy to approach writings about terror or trauma without flattening them.” (Jenni Ramone, THE Times Higher Education, timeshighereducation.com, March 28, 2019)“What sets Boehmer’s work apart from many other academic writers’ is its readability. … Throughout Postcolonial poetics, Boehmer’s careful examination of “reading” practices allows for not only a deeper understanding of the formal, aesthetic dimension of postcolonial writing, but our role as readers in decoding and experiencing a text. It constitutes an invigorating relocation of attention in postcolonial studies.” (Karina Magdalena Szczurek, LitNet, litnet.co.za, November, 2018)

“This finger-on-the-pulse book re-aligns postcolonial poetics and politics, reading and form and returns us to postcolonial concerns via new pathways.  A series of finely-calibrated readings range across regions and genres.  Written with Boehmer’s characteristic elegance and lucidity, this highly-teachable volume will be around for some time to come.” (Professor Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa)“Elleke Boehmer brings a much-needed emphasis on readerly engagement to the fields of postcolonial studies and world literature. In these lucid essays, Boehmer argues eloquently for a pragmatic poetics: one that is attuned to the affordance of form as well as the dynamic and charged relations between readers and literary works.” (Professor Rita Felski, University of Virginia, USA) “For those of us who’ve been trying for decades to drag the aesthetic into postcolonial studies, Elleke’s Boehmer’s lively, lucid, and wide-ranging book finally pushes it across the line. Postcolonial Poetics makes the spirited yet judicious argument that attention to form and literary structure need not shortchange political or material content. With its commanding knowledge of the field, this book reveals the aesthetic means by which literature illuminates the historical violence and material inequalities of the postcolonial world. Elucidating the relation between literature’s mimetic what and its formal how, Boehmer’s important intervention opens new futures for postcolonial studies.” (Professor Jahan Ramazani, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry)

Represents a key intervention in postcolonial studies from one of its founding proponents Puts questions of structure, symbol, and style centre-stage in a way unprecedented in postcolonial criticism to date Takes a broad overview of the discipline, supported by a range of salient case studies