A Transnational Poetics. By Jahan Ramazani. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, xvii pp.

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1 120 MLQ March 2011 Michele Elam is Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial Professor at Stanford University. Her most recent book is The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (forthcoming). She is working on a book about postrace postapartheid mixed-race literature and performance in the United States and South Africa. DOI / A Transnational Poetics. By Jahan Ramazani. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, xvii pp. Stephen Burt s blurb on the back of Jahan Ramazani s book is surely meant as a compliment. He praises A Transnational Poetics for giving the academy good thematic reasons to pay attention to the formal inventions for which [modern and contemporary poets]... should be known. On this account Ramazani s work should have the happy effect of attracting, in addition to the smallish group of readers who buy books about modern and contemporary poetry, the greater number interested in new ways of understanding national and transnational collectivities. Of course, chiding the academy for underappreciating poetry implies that it overappreciates transnationalism and that thinking about poetry s transnationalism is a necessary evil. Burt s praise seems to say that some people need a lure to think about poetic form, which is valued above the thematic matter of poets and languages circulating from one country to another. Ramazani s argument, that transnationalism s aesthetic strategies are among the engines of modern and contemporary poetic development and innovation (3), takes aim at the critical assumptions represented by Burt s generally appreciative remarks. Ramazani too would like to expand the audience for poetry and poetry criticism. But A Transnational Poetics has even more radical ambitions: it seeks to bring about a reconceptualization of twentieth- and twenty- first- century poetry studies (x). Thus it has a double audience: everyday readers of poetry and also professional readers such as Burt who are responsible for organizing and explaining the history of twentieth- century poetry. While Ramazani is happy to expand the archive and the audience for poetry, he hopes above all to change the organizing principles and explanations of literary history. Most chapters of A Transnational Poetics emphasize the details and aesthetic strategies of individual poems, and in this sense Ramazani supports the idea that formal innovations make poetry worth reading. However, he understands migration and globalization as the sources of those innovations.

2 Walkowitz Review 121 Thematic novelty is there, for example, in the hybrid affiliations claimed by poets from decolonizing spaces, but so are kinds of literary novelty irreducible to theme: new uses of idiom, lineation, rhyme, allusion, voice, and address. By asserting that these innovations are products of transnationalism and that they are pervasive, Ramazani calls for new pedagogies and new institutional paradigms. No longer limited to the biographical and historical context for a small handful of poets at the margins, transnationalism in Ramazani s book describes formal changes that bear, directly or indirectly, on all poetry in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. A Transnational Poetics is welcoming, curious, thoughtful, and eager to persuade. Ramazani is occasionally critical of scholars who insist on identifying the unique citizenship of poems, but he seems optimistic that his colleagues will give up their national paradigms once they see what he sees. For many scholars, lyric interiority is inhospitable to global concerns. Ramazani pushes against this view by emphasizing transnational materials, histories, and techniques. Although many of its chapters were first published, whole or in part, as independent essays, the book achieves a loose narrative that runs from major theoretical statements to conceptual treatments of travel and mourning as microgenres of transnational poetry, and finally to accounts of the uptake and transformation of modernist strategies. Many chapters treat modernist and postcolonial traditions in tandem, walking a fine line between refusing the national containers that separate literary histories and insisting on distinctions based on political histories of empire and decolonization. For instance, postcolonial poets generated nativity odes however conflicted to cultural identities still emerging, while the early- twentiethcentury Euromodernists (e.g., T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats) produced discordant requiems for a dying elite culture (140). The term Euromodernist convincingly provincializes one kind of modernism among several global responses to modernity, including the later postcolonial modernisms that Ramazani associates with, say, the African poet Christopher Okigbo and the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott. There is a downside to the concept of Euromodernism, however. It risks reaffirming, if only rhetorically, a decisive break between Europe and its others that it is Ramazani s overall mission to resist. Modernism floats here between a repertoire of aesthetic strategies that can be mobilized by anyone and a repertoire of cultural movements that use the past to imagine various political futures. In addition to transforming poetry studies and rethinking the distinctions between postcolonial and modernist studies, A Transnational Poetics aspires to change English literary studies. The history of literature in English, now largely national in its structure, needs to become more attentive to transnational histories of imagination, production, circulation, and reception. Thus Ramazani s book should be understood alongside recent studies

3 122 MLQ March 2011 of world literature by Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, Wai Chee Dimock, Brent Edwards, and Franco Moretti, all of whom argue that literary works need be treated nationally, regionally, and transnationally often at the same time. 1 These critics disagree on many points, but they share with Ramazani the claim that national containers have narrowed our understanding of individual works and of the relationships among works. Unlike Damrosch and Moretti, who call for a new emphasis on the circulation of texts, Ramazani emphasizes imagination and production: how, for example, experiences of decolonization, migration, and travel lead Walcott to produce a line such as I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me and how that line negotiates a long literary history of the poetic I (1). Ramazani s examples are strictly anglophone, and it seems fair to say that he is less interested in the migration of the works across geographic boundaries and into new languages than in histories of migration and globalization, in the feeling attached to multiple geographies, and in the transformations of English as it is indigenized and hybridized through the world. A Transnational Poetics offers three significant renovations to the business of literary history. The first is a welcome solution to the tug- of- war over expatriate writers such as Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Claude McKay, now simply poets who incorporate several geographies and modes of belonging and who reflect on multiple literary affiliations. Second, modernism and postcolonial critique are framed as mobile intellectual traditions guaranteed by no particular location. Third, and to my mind most important, literature is decoupled from anthropology and especially from national representativeness. For these three renovations alone Ramazani s book is noteworthy and ought to be read carefully by all who care about poetry and how imaginative literature shapes ideas of political community. As Ramazani admits, his transnationalism stops at the borders of language and, we might add, at the borders of print culture (a brief discussion of the calypso songs of Lord Kitchener is the single exception). Digital poetry, multilingual poetry, and poetry in English translation do not fit into his model for a new literary history. This is an understandable effect of Ramazani s long- standing commitment to anthology production. Instead of British or American poetry anthologies, Ramazani proposes anthologies of global poetry in English. Such a program is doable, and teachable, in part 1 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Franco Moretti, Conjectures on World Literature, New Left Review, no. 1 (2000):

4 Walkowitz Review 123 because, in theory, language can be identified and delimited. But replacing the nation- container with the language- container, for all the many gains, divvies up poems produced in multilingual regions, cities, and states (e.g., North America, France, and India) and separates them from other poems of similar concern and development. It partitions the corpus of writers who work in multiple languages, such as Rainer Maria Rilke (German, French, Russian), Fernando Pessoa (French, Portuguese, English), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (Korean, French, English), and the contemporary multimedia poets Young- Hae Chang Heavy Industries (English, Korean, French). Finally, it bypasses both widely circulated English translations of works composed in other languages and significant translations into other languages by major English- language poets. Ramazani does take up this concern briefly in the first chapter, ultimately arguing that poetry does not translate as well as drama, the novel, and epic and that poets tend to be most influenced by writers in their own languages. While this is indisputably true as a general tendency, many poets especially transnational poets have been influenced by predecessors and peers in other languages; the circulation of poetry into different languages, as Edwards shows, has been vital to the emergence of transnational literary and political cultures. Nancy Cunard s Negro: An Anthology is an excellent showcase for this development. 2 It brought together (in English) works by writers from four continents in several genres, including poetry originally written in English, French, and Spanish. Studies organized by language need to acknowledge influences in other languages and to show how literature has migrated or has not migrated in the form of books, magazines, letters, songs, films, Web pages, and anthologies. New studies might show, too, how some poets and editors of poetry have resisted the monolingualism of publishing houses, anthologies, and other institutions. A Transnational Poetics argues convincingly that transnational poetry cannot be all in one nation. To paraphrase that Euromodernist Ezra Pound, it cannot be all in one language, either. Thanks to Ramazani s eloquent and persuasive book, we have a much richer sense of how transnationalism has shaped modern and contemporary poetry in English. If his book inspires us to read more poetry, as it surely will, it also urges us to change how we edit, anthologize, interpret, and teach it. Rebecca L. Walkowitz 2 Nancy Cunard, ed., Negro: An Anthology (London: Wishart, 1934).

5 124 MLQ March 2011 Rebecca L. Walkowitz, associate professor of English at Rutgers University, is author of Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation (2006); editor or coeditor of seven books, including Immigrant Fictions: Contemporary Literature in an Age of Globalization (2006) and Bad Modernisms, with Douglas Mao (2006); and coeditor of the journal Contemporary Literature. Her essay Shakespeare in Harlem: The Norton Anthology, Propaganda, Langston Hughes appeared in the December 1999 issue of MLQ. DOI / Everybody s Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neoliberal America. By Gillian Harkins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, xx pp. Everybody s Family Romance confronts the 1980s and 1990s burgeoning of women s narratives about father- daughter incest, reading them as neither founded on gospel truth nor rooted in mass hysteria. Gillian Harkins sees such narratives as at once symptomatic of, intrinsic to, and occasionally resistant to the era s dramatic economic and policy changes. In her view, incest stories are a resource marshaled to organize the meanings and experience of global free- market liberalization, the redistribution of wealth upward, the rise of the security state, and the privatization of everything. This does not mean, however, that they cannot be turned to more radical ends. In short, the stories that the American media have taught us to understand as agonizingly personal, Harkins asks us to interpret as not only political but also, in the last instance, economic. Yet this is no postfeminist sellout. To Marxist studies of neoliberalism and its discontents, Harkins brings a feminist politics that refuses to discount domestic sexual violence as merely a metaphor for the economic or for the false consciousness of the privileged. To feminist studies of rape, incest, domesticity, and the family, she brings a commitment to reading for race and economics that exposes the white middle- class worldview of many feminist pieties. Everybody s Family Romance announces a break with earlier work on the family- romance tradition that tracks the coemergence of the bourgeois family, the democratic nation- state, and the novel work by Shirley Samuels, Gillian Brown, and others. 1 These scholars contend that the family form has 1 Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth- Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).