Review: Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics

Author(s): Lee M. Jenkins

Review by: Lee M. Jenkins
Source: Modern Philology, Vol. 110, No. 3 (February 2013), pp. E216-E219
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668584
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BOOK REVIEW

A Transnational Poetics. Jahan Ramazani. Chicago and London: University

of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. xvii221.
In A Transnational Poetics, Jahan Ramazani pursues his mission as a tireless
and eloquent proselytizer on behalf of poetry. This new collection of essays
offers a transnational supplement to the cross-cultural dynamics explored
in The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (University of Chicago Press,
2001), in which Ramazani sought to redress the relative marginalization of
poetry, and of poetry criticism, in the sphere of postcolonial studies. This
defense of poetry, iterated in A Transnational Poetics, is now extended into
the transnational paradigm that currently informs scholarship in modernist studies and American studies. As Ramazani notes, most commentary
on literary cosmopolitanism has been on prose fiction (3). Moreover,
poetry criticism, in which single-nation genealogies remain surprisingly
entrenched (23), has contributed to its own relative neglect in intercultural models of literary analysis. In A Transnational Poetics Ramazani creatively complicates the notion of the citizenship of a poem (25) and demonstrates the ways in which poetic compression allows us to examine in
close-up cross-cultural vectors (3). The eight essays collected here are a
working model of a transnational poetry criticism that is also aesthetically
attuned (xi). For example, Ramazani reconfigures the vexed relationship
between modernism and postcolonialism by splicing the methodology of
postcoloniality with the premium on form and style in modernist studies
(x). This remapping of transnational engagements across uneven global
terrain, rather than merely replicating colonial structures of domination,
yields fresh imaginative possibilities that generate new cultural work (11
12). T. S. Eliots influence on the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite is a
case in point, while ironies of influence are instanced in Ezra Pounds

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E216

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Book Review

E217

signal importance to Jewish poets from Louis Zukofsky through Allen Ginsberg to Charles Bernstein (46).
The first chapter, Poetry, Modernity, and Globalization, juxtaposes
the Scottish Hugh MacDiarmid and the Ugandan Okot pBitek, revealing
the mutual imbrication of the global and the local in the work of the two
poets. Complicating received notions of orientalism, Ramazani shows that
the traffic between modernism and empire goes both ways. In A Transnational Poetics, which follows, Ramazani contests the academic literary
nationalism that is a particular issue in the study of poetry and offers instead
his own paradigm, adapted from James Clifford (Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1997]), of what the third chapter of A Transnational Poetics terms Traveling
Poetry. In a dazzling display of the kind of contextual close reading that he
advocates, Ramazani shows that the sonic qualities of poetry in themselves
constitute a form of travel: In poetry, travelnot merely the plot-driven
excursus into a foreign landmay occur at the level of a substituted letter,
a varied rhythm, a pivoting line (59). Poetrys place-leaping lineation,
cross-cultural symbols, and aesthetic hybridization . . . affords a remarkable
freedom of movement and affiliative connection (6263). Traveling genres
are the focus of the fourth chapter, Nationalism, Transnationalism, and
the Poetry of Mourning. The sonnet and the elegy are prime examples of
genre operating as a transhistorical and transcultural template for literary
analysis (71). Ramazani, a leading scholar of the elegy, develops here what
he calls a taxonomy for elegiac Transnationalism (72) using W. B. Yeats as
his exemplar and drawing on his own fine studies of Yeats and of elegy, Yeats
and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy and the Sublime (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1990), and Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to
Heaney (University of Chicago Press, 1994). Arguing that the poetry of
mourning can be made to serve both nation-specific and cosmopolitan
ends (72), Ramazani suggests that it is elegys intertextuality that, despite
its frequent investment in the discourse of nationalism, renders it an intrinsically transnational modeintertextuality is always and inherently transnational, and so poetrys cross-national molecular structure betrays the
national imaginary on behalf of which it is sometimes made to speak (13).
The intertextual properties of elegy, however, make it what Ramazani, ventriloquizing Harold Bloom, terms weak transnationalism, in contradistinction to more aggressive varieties of transnational poetics, which flaunt
their discrepant cultural materials (81).
The chapter that follows, Modernist Bricolage, Postcolonial Hybridity,
both extends the chronological frame of modernism and complicates postcolonial rubrics that excoriate modernist writers for their complicity with
the processes of empire. Ramazani argues instead that Western modernism
enabled a range of non-Western poets after World War II to explore their

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E218

MODERN PHILOLOGY

hybrid cultures and postcolonial experience (97). Indeed, in the hands of

African poets Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka, modernism is a tool
of liberation (98). As Ramazani reminds us, the modernist poets were the
first to create a formal vocabulary for the intercultural collisions and juxtapositions, the epistemic instabilities and decenterings, of globalization
(99). Ramazani highlights a reciprocity between modernist and postcolonial poetries over and above modernists primitivist expropriations of nonWestern alterity: in this way this chapter revises as well as revisits Edward
Saids Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), the seminal
text of postcolonialism, but one that closes off as well as opens new routes
of enquiry.
Chapter 6 in A Transnational Poetics, Calibans Modernities, Postcolonial Poetries, extends the argument and reach of the preceding chapter
in calling for the renovation of modern poetry studies in a global context.
With reference to the work of Brathwaite, Louise Bennett, Derek Walcott,
and Okot, Ramazani demonstrates the ways in which these poets modernize the indigenous and indigenize the modern (130). In the next chapter,
Poetry and Decolonization, Ramazani again engages Said, along with
Homi Bhabha, and calls once more for a methodological hybridity appropriate to the study of cross-cultural poetics. Decolonization and poetry are
mutually informing, it is suggested, the one helping us to understand the
other. In his coda, Ramazani addresses the topic of Poetry and the Translocal: Blackening Britain. The work of calypso poet Lord Kitchener, dub
artist Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Afro-Caribbean poet Grace Nichols is, as
Ramazani argues, proof that black British experience gives expression and
shape to cross-geographic experience (16364). Disappointingly, though,
Ramazani makes little mention of new voices, like that of Daljit Nagra, for
example, whose award-winning collection Look We Have Coming to Dover!
(2007) both nods to D. H. Lawrence and revels in the creative and comedic
resources of Punglish (English as spoken by Punjabi immigrants). The
remarkable work of bicultural women poets such as Imtiaz Dharker or
Patience Agbabi, whose experiments with the sonnet would comport well
with Ramazanis investment in poetic form, is a surprising omission and is
indicative of the sole relative weakness in what is otherwise a superb and frequently a brilliant book: Ramazanis canon of poets, although it is eclectic,
is too firmly fixed. Several of the poets discussed in A Transnational Poetics
are subjects of his earlier Hybrid Muse, and where Ramazani does extend
the range of his exemplars, he does not consistently choose the poets most
conducive to his method of analysis. His attention to Irish poets extends
here, as it does in his Poetry of Mourning, beyond Yeats to Seamus Heaney,
but not to Thomas Kinsella or John Montague, who are transnational
Irish poets (whereas Heaney is not) and whose work could profitably be
read within the matrix of influencereferenced in other contexts here

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Book Review

E219

by Ramazaniof William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and the Black

Mountain school.
Like the modernist and neomodernist poets he discusses, Ramazani is
himself a bricoleur, recycling and reshaping his own earlier work on elegy
and on postcolonial poetics. A Transnational Poetics assembles position pieces
published in a stellar array of journals and edited collections, but it is much
more than the sum of its parts. A major contribution to the newly globalized fields of modernist and American studies, as well as to the always
already transnational frameworks of black Atlantic and postcolonial studies (xi), this book not only identifies the pressing need to reconsider poetrys cosmopolitan bearings (x) but also demonstrates in abundance the
rich rewards that such a reconsideration, when undertaken by as adept a
critic as Jahan Ramazani, can yield.
Lee M. Jenkins
University College Cork

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