Mapping the Postcolonial in Anglophone Literatures
By: [Instructor: Kathy-Ann Tan ].
Material type:
BookPublisher: BCB 2016Subject(s): Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Leela Gandhi, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall
| | |
| Item type | Current location | Call number | Status | Date due |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Reference
|
BardBerlinLibrary 2nd floor | Not for loan |
In this seminar, students will first be acquainted with the key concepts and terminologies used in postcolonial theory that analyze the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism on contemporary formations of individual/collective identity and cultural belonging. In particular, we will focus on the theoretical writings of, among others, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Leela Gandhi, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall, examining the key concepts of hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence, alterity, “otherness”, diaspora, orientalism and the subaltern in their critical contexts. Subsequently, we will use these theories as a conceptual framework to explore how the issues of home and belonging, migration and exile, diaspora, place/displacement, citizenship, the body, gender, class, race and ethnicity are broached in selected works of Anglophone literature: V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen (1974), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), M. Nourbese Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1988), Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies (1999), Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013). By the end of the course, students will have grasped a nuanced understanding of the material and epistemological conditions of postcoloniality, as well as of how cultural and collective identities are explored, (re-)negotiated and mapped out in/through Anglophone literary texts.
There are no comments for this item.