130199 PS Social History of Lit. (PS): Introduction to Postcolonial Literature and Theory (2015W)

Postcolonial theory, which developed in the 1980s, is today one of the most productive analytical tools for the study of culture. Rather than being an abstract theory, it is a dynamic discourse that emerged from the cultural and social experience of the colonial and postcolonial citizen. Through a close reading of literary texts, the course will study colonial discourse as a textual enterprise of domination and postcolonial discourse as a form of resistance against the Eurocentric assumptions of English literature and culture and as a way of redefining the postcolonial self and the world. The reading selection covers the most representative English-language postcolonial authors from Africa, East Asia, the Caribbean, United States and Britain, focusing mainly on short fiction and non-fiction. Literary texts will be used as the basis for the explication of key terms of postcolonial theory such as “anti-colonial resistance”, “hybridity”, “otherness” and “mimicry”. The texts are roughly chronologically subdivided into eleven main topics: imperial (colonial) writing, anti-colonial discourses, theorizations of race and language, the postcolonial self, postcolonial historical revisionism, national constructions, gender and the postcolonial nation, postcolonialism and globalization, migrancy and displacement, and transcultural writing.