POST-COLONIAL LIT. & THEORY (GS3081)

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Explores literary works from Africa, Asia, India, Latin American, Ireland and/or the Caribbean alongside classics from the Western canon that address key colonial and post-colonial issues and concepts: imperialism, nationalism, globalization, empire, resistance writing, feminism, hybridity, border-crossing, exile and cultural translation. Introduces major voices in post-colonial literary and cultural studies, Franz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi Bhaba, and Gayatri Spivak.

Code: 
GS3081
Name: 
POST-COLONIAL LIT. & THEORY
Discipline: 
GS (Gender Studies)
Type: 
Regular
Level: 
Undergraduate
Credits: 
4
Can be taken twice for credit?: 
No
Pre-requisites: 
None
Co-requisites: 
None

Learning Outcomes

  1. To appreciate the comparative scope of postcolonial theory (orientalism, the third space, the role of the intellectual etc.) in its application to literary texts, but also to recognize its limits
  2. To approach postcolonial studies as a critique of colonialism; but also to see its broader relevance as a deconstruction of any discourse of power (e.g. extreme nationalism) that seeks to legitimize exclusion
  3. To approach postcolonial theory as an intertextual “genealogy” in which each theorist builds on and extends the work of previous thinkers
  4. To be critical of postcolonial theory as the intellectual production of postcolonial intellectuals who risk silencing the subalterns they wish to empower
  5. To explore the potential of culture (which includes literature, but also other forms like performance and the web), to resist discourses of power through messages of survival and self-affirmation
  6. To go beyond representations of French identity in terms of baguettes and berets or laicité, and discover the postcolonial face of a hybrid, multicultural France
  7. To place postcolonial literary texts in terms of the specific historical, socio-cultural and linguistic contexts in which they emerged
  8. To recognize the stylistic and generic specificities (rewriting history, national allegory, magical realism etc.) of postcolonial literature

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