ENGL 375, Topics in Postcolonial Literature, An Introduction to Reading Literature from Post-Colonial Perspectives, Spring 2015

Abstract

Aims: In this course we read and discuss eight 20th Century novels and a number of films that deal in different ways with the past five hundred years of colonial and postcolonial history. The aim of the course is to foster postcolonial theoretical understandings of liter-ature. We seek to understand the manner in which multiple histories and different aspects of colonialism inform the content and form of the fiction we read and the lives we live today. Through an exploration of this fiction in conjunction with one theory textbook we seek to understand the primary concerns of postcolonial textual analysis, its key concepts and a number of the field’s contemporary debates, including questions of race, slavery, diasporic cultures, migration, language, gender, habitation, resistance, hybridization, power and the transformations associated with identity through globalization.