An examination of various aspects of the modern literature written in English in Africa, the Caribbean, India, and Southeast Asia. Topics will vary from semester to semester. Students should consult the department's "Announcement of Classes" for current offerings well before the start of the semester.

Beginning with a preliminary study of the discussion and debates surrounding the usage of the terms “colonial” and “postcolonial,” we will read novels from several postcolonial locations. The course does not take at face value the overt distinctions between “colonial” and “postcolonial”; neither does it seek to arrive at a singular understanding of the “postcolonial.” Rather, by tracing different histories and narratives of colonialism and decolonization, we will discuss how in our novels of study, these two constituencies continually inform each other in ways that also inflect everyday terms like “nationalism” or “globalization.” In so doing, we will examine how ideas of power, language, and resistance are variously formulated or reworked in and through a literary register. The novels are set or written in and from diverse locations—the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent--and direct our attention to questions of class and race, ecology, history and historiography, gendered nationhood, reproductive and domestic labor, and subalternity, among others.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills