REWORKING LOCAL MATERIALS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ANGLOPHONE POSTCOLONIAL POETRY

Abstract

This thesis examines the ways in which twentieth-century postcolonial poets rework local materials such as renewal myths, cosmological worldviews, spiritual belief systems, and literary traditions. It investigates how poets adapt these materials to challenge colonial discourses, redefine cultural heritage, and negotiate their position in a modern, globalising world. Taking a case study approach, I analyse the nature of the poets’ inclusion of local materials and its significance in three collections: Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri (1976), Seamus Heaney’s North (1975) and Christopher Okigbo’s Heavensgate (1962). I argue that reworkings do not diminish the cultural specificity of the local. Instead, they generate new local materials – ones in which the local bears the imprint of engagement with contemporary, modern, and global contexts. By taking this approach to the local, this thesis offers to postcolonial poetry studies a more careful and attuned reading practice than the hybridity model which tends to misread or efface the agency of the local in its relationship to the colonial when countering reductive nativist interpretations, which, in their turn, confine the poets’ evocation of the local to a mere revival of a precolonial past.