ENGL 285

Fall 2021 All Classes

All Classes

Postcolonial Literature in English

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Credit: 3 hours.

Examination of selected postcolonial literature, theory, and film as texts that "write back" to dominant European representations of power, identity, gender and the Other. Postcolonial writers, critics and filmmakers studied may include Franz Fanon, Edward Said, Aime Cesaire, Ousmane Sembene, Chinua Achebe, Michelle Cliff, Mahesweta Devi, Buchi Emecheta, Derek Walcott and Marlene Nourbese-Philip.

Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.

This course satisfies the General Education Criteria in Fall 2022 for:

Cultural Studies - Non-West

Humanities – Lit & Arts

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ENGL 285 class schedule data for fall 2021
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	32221	Lecture-Discussion	F	2:00PM -2:50PM	MWF	119 David Kinley Hall	Basu, M	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/23/21-12/08/21 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Non-West course. Section Info: As Deepika Bahri writes, “Although there is considerable debate about the exact parameters of the field and even the definition of the term ‘postcolonial,’ in a very general sense, it refers to the interactions between European nations and the societies they colonized in the modern period.” These interactions were violent, sometimes grotesquely funny, always shifting, and above all, transformative for both sides – colonizer and colonized. This is why we begin our course with a text that despite having been authored by perhaps the most representative literary figure of the Western world expresses a distinctly uneasy relationship with the colonial encounter. This text will function as our entry point into a host of other writings composed in the wake of mid-twentieth century liberation struggles across the globe. At this time, many writers from what used to be called ‘the third-world’ began to give expression to their cultural experiences in the language of the former colonial power. Given that it is called Postcolonial Literature in English, it is the language of the former colonial power that will be significant for our readings in this course. We will strive to understand what forms such a language takes as it attempts to carry the weight of diverse realities, as it negotiates the taut relations between class, gender, racial and religious identities, and as it shapes and reshapes itself in the midst of changing social institutions, lifestyles, and habits. Given the objectives for this course as they are laid out above, the primary method of the class will involve close readings of the texts as well as an attempt to move outwards and to broaden the horizons of interpretation by allowing the reading of an individual text to be informed by readings of other texts and political-cultural events. We will read in a fairly wide range of genres moving from critical/theoretical essays, to novels, plays, poetry, and at least one travelogue. As you will notice, we shall not be following a necessarily chronological approach, but rather one that enables us to foreground thematic connections pertinent to postcolonial thought. Thus, summarizing the reading will not be the object of this class – indeed our texts will resist this kind of reading in favor of an investigation that seeks to think in a provocative way about the connections that these texts ask us to make, and about whether such connections remain pertinent even to our contemporary moment.