Should Eliot and his writing be tagged “American” since he grew up in the United States and wrote “Prufrock” and “Preludes” there? Or “Brit.
But Eliot, whose transatlanticism is hardly a surprise, and a variety of other poets, whose cross-nationality is less frequently considered, brought this sensible institutional practice into collision with the transnationalism of modern and contemporary poetry in English. By standard editorial practice, nationality is, along with dates and occupation, one of three identificatory matrices, or miniature hermeneutic triangles, that also interlock in Webster’s Dictionary or The Encyclopaedia Britannica. Glossing the phrase “Eliotic bones” in Melvin Tolson’s Harlem Gallery, I was perplexed when a copy editor asked me to name T. Poetry and the Translocal: Blackening Britain 163 Notes 181Įditing the third edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, I was reminded of Captain MacMorris’s question in Henry V: “What ish my nation?” Though working on a cosmopolitan anthology, I soon discovered I hadn’t escaped the riddles of national identity. Modernist Bricolage, Postcolonial Hybridity 95Ĭaliban’s Modernities, Postcolonial Poetries 117 Nationalism, Transnationalism, and the Poetry of Mourning 71 pn1111.r36Ĩ09.1'93581-dc22 2008041464 o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992. Includes bibliographical references and index. Isbn-13: 978- 0-226- 70344-2 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226- 70344-4 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ramazani, Jahan, 1960– A transnational poetics / Jahan Ramazani. Published 2009 Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2009 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. He is the coeditor of two books, most recently The Twentieth Century and After and volume F of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, eighth edition (2006), and is the author of three books, most recently The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (University of Chicago Press, 2001). Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia.