Course syllabus
ENGLISH 786 – Postcolonial Literary Studies
Convenor: Claudia Marquis
Email: c.marquis@auckland.ac.nz
Phone: 3737 599, extension 87592
I always respond to emails, but do not expect a response to your email on weekends.
Course Description:
This course engages with postcolonialism as a site of cultural theorising in a globalised world, but especially as a mode of analysis of a large, new field of contemporary literature. In foregrounding colonialism’s profound worldwide impact, we discover a critical lens that offers flexible methodologies for tackling imperial literature, but especially for engaging with contemporary literary texts produced in current former colonies in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Americans, and the Pacific.
In taking up topics like decolonisation, migration, language, cultural production and social representation, postcolonial studies approaches the study of literature in ways that intersect with fields such as critical race theory, indigenous and feminist studies. A primary issue for us is the problematic disciplinarity of postcolonial studies, reflected in topics to be addressed, and in a range of questions to be tackled. Topics will include postcolonial modernity, nation and narration, fictions of nationhood and development, the Black Atlantic, migrant and diasporic aesthetics, marginality and hybridity, new imperialisms, gender in postcolonised history, the metropolitan and the cosmopolitan.
A general investigation of the postcolonial will occupy most of the course, but this semester we will focus on literature of three special regions – India, Pakistan and the Caribbean. Such a focus is designed to foster a proper sense of the variety of cultural formations and experiences, social and political practices covered by the concept of the postcolonial, while also allowing a more focused and developed study of a chosen region, its history, culture and literature.
There are no prerequisites for this class, but it will be helpful if you have done some reading in postcolonial literature. Reading for the class is quite heavy and everyone will be expected to get it done, since we will be spending at least half our time each week in discussion.
Prescribed texts:
An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, Arundhati Roy
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
The Blind Man’s Garden, Nadeem Aslam
Breath, Eyes, Memory, Edwidge Danticat
Selected Poems, Derek Walcott (will be provided)
New Rulers of the World, John Pilger
The Wretched of the Earth – Frantz Fanon
Fruit of the Lemon – Andrea Levy
Recommended Reading:
These will be assigned weekly. But as a starting point you may wish to look at the following:
Althusser, Louis. On Ideology, Verso, 2008.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Verso. 2000
Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures.
Beckles, Hilary. Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, Pluto Press, 1986
Gilroy, Paul. There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack, After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic.
Gilroy, Paul. Against Race.
Gilroy, Paul. After Empire
Jameson, Fredric. ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’. In Social
Text, No. 15 (Autusmn, 1986)). pp. 65-88.
Wa’Thiongo, Ngugi. Decolonising the Mind.
Parry, Benita. ‘Postcolonialism: Conceptual Category or Chimera?’ in Yearbook of English Studies, vol 27, The Politics of Postcolonial Criticism (1997), pp. 3-21.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. [I recommend the 2nd edition, which has an appendix where Said responds to critics of his concept of Orientalism.] Orientalism is considered by many as the founding work on which postcolonial theory developed.
Spivak, Gayatri. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Nelson and Grossberg, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, pp. 271-313.
Young, Robert, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (Routledge, 1995)
Course assessment:
Seminar paper: You are expected to introduce one of the prescribed texts focusing on particular topics for discussion. You will be expected to produce a reading list.
Full participation in discussion week by week is mandatory.
Worth: 20% of your final grade
Written up seminar paper: Seminar paper handed in must reflect class discussion. You must build into the paper itself questions raised and your response. So the project becomes a different thing from your notes/script. In other words, it is like having a text and a revised text. You build on the spoken text in order to produce the revised text. And, of course, you must also provide a bibliography.
Worth: 20%. Due: As soon as possible, after our seminar.
Essay (5000 words): You are expected to devise your own research essay topic. In your essay, you must discuss at least TWO of the prescribed texts and include a full bibliography.
Worth: 60%. Due Date: 23 May, 2016.
We will be reading some marvellous texts, which I hope you will enjoy.
TIMETABLE
Week Date Topic
1 27 July Introduction
2 3 August The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire
3 10 August The God of Small Things
4 17 August The White Tiger
5 24 August The New Rulers of the World
6 31 August The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Mid-semester break: 2 September – 17 September
7 21 September The Blind Man’s Garden
8 28 September The Wretched of the Earth
9 5 October Breath, Eyes, Memory
10 12 October Derek Walcott Poems
11 19 October Andrea Levy (?)
12 26 October Conclusion
Course summary:
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