Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature at the English Department, University of Oxford. She is a founding figure in the field of colonial and postcolonial studies, known internationally for her research in Anglophone literatures of empire and anti-empire, while also being a novelist and short-story writer. She is the general editor of the book series, Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures (OUP). Many Chinese scholars came to understand the postcolonial studies through her book, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (1995), when this field began to be introduced into China. This interview, conducted in two parts before and during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, addresses a number of important issues in postcolonial studies in the UK, such as the history of the postcolonial literary studies in Britain, the core issues the British scholars are currently concerning about, the relationship between colonial and postcolonial studies, the influence of the ethnic and immigrant writers on contemporary British literature, the prospects of the postcolonial studies, and the impact on it of the COVID-19 pandemic. While indicating "immigration" as the key topic all along, she emphasizes the importance of border-crossing in postcolonial studies and its methodological improvement on interdisciplinary studies.
