Global imaginaries: Postcolonial poetry and transnational literary exchange

"Global Imaginaries" investigates how recent poetry from the Caribbean, South-Asian Britain, and Northern Ireland represents and re-imagines the economic, political, and cultural consequences of global modernity. Throughout, I chart the transnational circulation of a globalized Irish aesthetic as it travels, takes root, and re-circulates in postcolonial poetries written in the context of diaspora and migration. As a resistant cultural and political practice, postcolonial poetry enacts alternative modernities that take shape in and through transnational circuits of literary exchange.;After surveying critical debates over the postcolonial and the global through a reading of W.B. Yeats's "Lapis Lazuli," I then consider one of Yeats's chief inheritors, Derek Walcott and the poverty of global economy in Omeros (1990). Against the strictures of the global capitalist economy, Walcott's epic of the Caribbean invents a poetics of global economy whose value derives in self-sacrifice, giving, and sustainability. From the question of postcolonial poetry and global economy, I turn to the contentious domain of political citizenship for South-Asian British subjects in Daljit Nagra's Look We Have Coming to Dover! (2007). Repeatedly turning to Irish writers to meditate on the problem of inclusion and exclusion in multiethnic Britain, Nagra's lyric poems forge a poetics of literary citizenship, one which potentially could include anyone within its sphere of figurative sovereignty but that nevertheless remains highly sensitive to those on the margins of belonging. Whereas Walcott and Nagra "go Irish" to contend with the economic and political dimensions of global modernity, the Northern Irish Paul Muldoon "plays Indian" to globalize Irish cultural identity in his long poem "Madoc: A Mystery" (1990). Here I argue that the Irish--Indian connection in "Madoc" does not merely exoticize native cultures, but instead uncovers an imaginative bond between them through a shared, cross-cultural trauma.;Taking the world itself as literature's horizon of possibility, contemporary postcolonial poetry constructs complex textual circuits of transnational literary exchange which imaginatively respond to and figuratively recuperate from global modernity's traumatic consequences. The global imaginaries of postcolonial poetry thus produce alternative discursive formations of modernity that might be made on behalf of the dispossessed and for the sake of a democracy to come.