This event forms part of our year-long Formations programme, delivered in partnership with Nottingham Trent University's Postcolonial Studies Centre. We are pleased to announce our November & December events, under the thematic banner – Formation: Land, focussing on land, agriculture, landscape, and place. We will consider dispossession, migration, and ways the human and land interact, and we invite you to think about recent innovative writing about how humans are connected with the living environment and our heritage.

Jenni Ramone, Postcolonial Literatures and the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading. Interviewed by Bethan Evans

In this event, Jenni discusses the significance of reading for understanding place (Cuba, Nigeria, the UK, and India), and some of the fascinating publishing and reading locations explored in the book.

Book Description:

This book asks what reading means in India, Nigeria, the UK, and Cuba, through close readings of literary texts from postcolonial, spatial, architectural, cartographic, materialist, trauma, and gender perspectives. It contextualises these close readings through new interpretations of local literary marketplaces to assert the significance of local, not global meanings.

The book offers longer case studies on novels that stage important reading moments: Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps (1953), Leonardo Padura’s Adios, Hemingway (2001), Tabish Khair’s Filming (2007), Chibundhu Onuzo’s Welcome to Lagos (2017), and Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016). Chapters argue that while India’s literary market was disrupted by Partition, literature offers a means of moving beyond trauma; in post-Revolutionary Cuba, the Special Period led to exploitation of Cuban literary culture, resulting in texts that foreground reading spaces; in Nigeria, the market hosts meeting, negotiation, reflection, and trade, including the writer’s trade; while Black consciousness bookshops and writing in Britain operated to challenge the UK literary market, a project still underway.

This book is a vindication of reading, and of the resistant power and creative potential of local literary marketplaces. It insists on ‘located reading’, enabling close reading of world literatures sited in their local materialities.

Book review:

“In this remarkable, stimulating and urgent book, Jenni Ramone superbly underscores the power of reading to contest authority’s demands. Insisting upon the local as resistant, unruly and disruptive, Ramone pursues the practice of ‘located’ reading as both a significant literary preoccupation and a meaningful tool of political consciousness-raising. Rigorously interdisciplinary and persistently ground-breaking, Ramone’s study challenges at last the tired cliche that the global literary marketplace has effectively defused postcolonial literatures’ dissident designs.” (John McLeod, University of Leeds, UK)

Biographical notes:

Jenni Ramone is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at NTU. Her recent book publications include Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading, The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing, Postcolonial Theories, and Salman Rushdie and Translation. Jenni Ramone specializes in global and postcolonial literatures and the literary marketplace. She is pursuing new projects on Global Literature and Gender, and on literature and maternity.

Bethan Evans is a PhD candidate at NTU, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the Midlands3Cities doctoral training partnership. She specialises in black British short fiction, and her areas of interest are postcolonial and black British literature, narrative form, and the publishing industry.

This event will take place online. Attendees will be sent a link closer to the event date.