Plenary Lecture: “Reading Protest: Postcolonial Poetics Today”
The paper will explore reading as itself a resistance practice, in a field, the postcolonial, that has in the past often assumed that the interrogation of colonial, postcolonial or indeed posttruth conditions arises from what is represented in the text, rather than from the reader’s engagement with the text. I will consider those forms that may stimulate and guide such resistant reading, including what I call the poetics of juxtaposition and confrontation, but also effects of persistence, continuation, and endurance, effects that are reinforced and enhanced through the operation of various diachronic techniques. I will demonstrate these ideas through readings of poetry by Serote and Putuma and short stories by divers hands.