A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being by Kaiama L. Glover (review)

Abstract

163 Pascale Casanova, and Franco Moretti, among others. Yet, despite Ramazani’s impressive transcendence of the national as an analytical category, the question of the dominance of the category of “the nation” in reading poetry remains. This is understandable because Ramazani’s focus is on a transnational understanding of poetics; however, certain questions remain: if we take the nation as a social construct, how is the national constructed in the postcolonial world? How can we reimagine polytemporality and polyspatiality from the complex discursive construct of the nation, when it is as complex (in many instances) as the very concept of the “transnational”? In his second chapter, for example, Ramazani thinks of place in poetry as both “local” and “extra-local,” but he ascribes the extra-locality wholly to the transnational; yet, there is also the possibility of the local interacting with the national as a category, which Ramazani bypasses in his focus on the transnational, thus screening out the many ways the local is posed against the national. If forms are transnational, do they originate from the nation as a community or the nation as a state? These are not questions that Ramazani must or ought to have answered, but further studies certainly warrant a rethinking of globality in a world of solidified nationalisms.