Course syllabus

ENGLISH 346: African and Caribbean Literature (15 points)
SEMESTER 2, 2018

 

 

 
Course Convenor:  Claudia Marquis

Teacher: Claudia Marquis

Lecturer:  Claudia Marquis, Arts 1, Room 637, ext 87592

Contact details:  Office Hours, 3-4 p.m. Tuesday, or by arrangement.  If you are unable to see me in my Office hours, you must make an appointment. 

Email: c.marquis@auckland.ac.nz

Staff in this paper always respond to student emails, but you should not expect a response during weekends.  Please ensure that your email has a proper address and subject line as well as a proper signature.  We do like to know the name of the student to whom we are writing, firstly, but also that you know to whom your email note is addressed. It is also inappropriate to address staff with 'hello there'.  And please remember that an email is not a text message.

 Email is for quick, brief queries and responses. If your email message requires a lengthy reply – more than two or three sentences – you may be asked to discuss your query in person.

 

Course delivery format:

 2 hours of lectures and 1 hour of tutorial

(Room details can be viewed on Student Services Online)

 Summary of Course Description:              

 The Caribbean, paradise or prison?  This island region, by virtue of its geography and history, embraces cultural elements of Africa, India, Europe and North America; this inheritance presents itself today in centrifugal as well as centripetal, diasporic terms.  If the characteristic Caribbean world view is eclectic, the common history of the region is grounded in the African slave-trade; in particular, beyond the middle passage, the plantation system has fundamentally shaped the demographic, social and economic patterns of the hybrid, cultural forms manifested throughout the Caribbean.  In this course, we cross national boundaries in order to focus on the dominant problems that surface in the literatures of the region.  Our focus will primarily be on Caribbean and African societies, in order to address a range of issues connected to these variously hybrid cultures – slavery, black identity and sexuality, nation/narration, home and location/dislocation.  If this involves taking account of myth and history, politics and language, in relation to the connected worlds of Africa and the Caribbean, our first concern will be to investigate literary texts written in these circumstances.  Both Africa and the Caribbean have occupied the place of fantasy for European and American audiences.  This course looks more closely at literatures that take the measure of this fantasy, perforce, but also achieve what we might call a mixed singularity.

I expect that in a course of this kind there will be a variety of opinions on issues discussed.  All opinions are welcome as well as vigorous debate. Nonetheless, in discussion, we will respect each other, even if/when we disagree strongly with an expressed view.

 Course outcomes:

• Learning Outcomes:

  Students will have explored how race, class, gender, history, and identity are presented and problematized in the literary texts

  Students will have gained a critical understanding of ways in which the theory and practice of postcolonial writing has been conceptualised and understood by scholars working in this field

  Students will have developed knowledge and understanding of the roles played by various forms of writing in representation of postcolonial subjectivity

  Students will have gained experience of a range of colonial and postcolonial discourses from countries and regions such as Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific, and will have explored issues arising from colonisation, independence, and diasporic migration in these areas.

  Students will have learned how to contextualise postcolonial writing in terms of its historical and geographical specificities, and will have developed their knowledge and understanding of selected themes, enabling them to define and carry out an independent piece of research

  Students will be familiar with methodological issues and problems of literary and cultural analysis, enabling them to undertake independent research with confidence, at an advanced level.

 Assessment Summary:

Weighting of assignments and due dates

                  20%  class test               week 5

                  30% essay                      week 10  (Due date: 4 October, 2018 -- 3 p.m.)

                 10% tutorial work

                  40% exam

Information provided on Canvas, at this time, is not set in stone, so please check again for particular details at the start of semester 2.

Weekly Topics:

Lectures: Tuesday 10 a.m. & Thursday 11 a.m.

Week 1	Introduction	Claudia Marquis
	Heart of Darkness	"
Week 2:	Things Fall Apart	"
	Things Fall Apart	"
Week 3:	Nervous Conditions	"
	Nervous Conditions	"
Week 4	Purple Hibiscus	"
	Purple Hibiscus	"
Week 5	Introduction to Caribbean	"
	Class Test	"
Week 6	West Indian Folktales	"
	Life and Debt (DVD)	"
	MID-SEMESTER BREAK       27 AUG   –   8 SEPT
Week 7	Coming Home and Other Stories	"
	In the Castle of My Skin	"
Week 8	In the Castle of My Skin	"
	Essay Writing Class	"
Week 9	Small Island	"
	Small Island	"
Week 10	Small Place	"
	No class – Essay Due
Week 11	Lucy	"
	Walcott	"
Week 12	Nichols	"
	Wrap-up/Exam Prep	"

                                                         

Prescribed Texts:

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Chimamanda Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions

George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin

Andrea Levy, Small Island

Grace Nichols, I is a long memoried woman

Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy and A Small Place

Poems by Derek Walcott (provided in course reader)

June Henfrey, Coming Home and Other Stories

 

 Recommended Texts:

Here is a useful page for you. I suggest you put it on your 'favourites' and visit it from time to time.

http://www.caribbeanstudies.org.uk/links.htm

 Also this list of Postcolonial lit journals

 http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/anglophone/pocojournals.html

Akala -- frequently used as an expert on British history, racism (etc.).  Call him up online.

 

Amativa Kumar, Passport Photos

Arundhati Roy,The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire

Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says

Ngugi WaThiongo, Decolonising the Mind

Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory”

            ‘Postcolonialism: What’s in a name?’, in Late Imperial Culture

Hamza Alavi, ‘The State in Postcolonial Societies’

Anthony Appiah, ‘Is the Post in Postcolonial the same as the Post in Postmodern’

Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin, The Post-Colonial Reader

Homi BhaBha, ‘The Other Question’ and ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, in Location of Culture

Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial: A Critical Introduction

Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack

            After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia

            ‘The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity’

Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects, At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World

Stuart Hall, ‘When was the Postcolonial?’, Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices,

‘Negotiating Caribbean Identities’, New Left Review 209: 3–14.

            ‘What is this Black in Black Popular Culture’ in Gina Dent, Black Popular Culture.

Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

Hirsch, Afua, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging. February, 2018. (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED)

Fredric Jameson, ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, in Social Text

Renu Juneja, Caribbean Transactions: West Indian Culture in Literature

Claudia Marquis," 'Bombarded with Words': Language and Regions in George Lamming's In the Castle of my Skin" in What Countrey's This? And Whither Are We Gone?" (2010)

Claudia Marquis, 'Home Thoughts from Abroad: Slavery and Cultural Memory', in Contested Identities: Literary Negotiations in Time and Place'  (2015).

Claudia Marquis, '"Making s spectacle of yourself": The art of anger in Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place.'  Routledge, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, (2018)

Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (2012).

Benita Parry, ‘Postcolonialism: ‘Conceptual Category or Chimera?’

Gayatri Spivak, ‘Subaltern Studies’ and ‘Marginality in the Teaching Machine’

Sara Suleri, ‘Women Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial condition’

Tiffin and Lawson, De-Scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality

Hilary Beckles, Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society

Material will be added to this list from time to time.

 

 Workload and deadlines for submission of coursework:           

The English Department requires on-time submission of all coursework.  If you are unable to hand in an assignment by the due date, you must put your case for an extension to the convenor.  If an extension is granted, you must attach to your submitted essay EITHER an Extension Request form bearing the new submission date and signature of the convenor, OR a document such as an email from the convenor.  Extensions will only be granted for compelling reasons, such as illness, or other unforeseen circumstances. [Another essay due on the same day does not constitute grounds for an extension.]  A doctor’s certificate (or equivalent) must be provided to the convenor or tutor.  An extension must be requested in advance of the due date for the assignment, unless there is a genuine cause preventing this, in which case the extension should be sought as soon as is practicable after the due date.  LATE WORK WITHOUT AN EXTENSION WILL NOT BE MARKED.  It is better to hand in work of poor quality or unfinished than to hand in nothing at all.  A fail, unless it is plagiarized, will generate some marks and that can make the difference between passing and failing this paper.

Even with an extension, an essay submitted after the due date will receive a grade, but no detailed comments.  So please make every effort to hand in your essays by the due date.

Upload an electronic copy of your essay to CANVAS.  Electronic copies will automatically be put through turnitin.

Essays must be submitted in hard copy at the Arts Students Centre, Ground Level. 

Plagiarism and Academic Honesty:

Plagiarism includes the use of a quotation, that is, the exact words of a text (interview, lecture, periodical, book, or website), without quotation marks and documentation; the paraphrasing of ideas or passages from a text without documentation; the inclusion from a text of information not generally known to the general public without documentation; and the following of the structure or style of a secondary source without documentation.

It is essential that you familiarise yourself with the University's policy on plagiarism.