English 319: Postcolonial Literature: Anglophone Africa, India, the Caribbean

When Chinua Achebe, the great Nigerian novelist and essayist, writes that “a Westerner would be most reluctant to destroy ‘in a page or two’ the very angel and paragon of creation—the individual hero . . . . The non-Westerner does not as a rule have those obligations because in his tradtional scheme and hierarchy the human hero does not loom so large” (“The Writer and His Community”), he captures just one of the many ways the opposition Western/non-Western puts pressure on the literary enterprise and cultural politics of what has come to be known as the “postcolonial.” This course introduces students to a range of authors, all writing in English, whose works offer views onto the complex interactions of local and cosmopolitan forms and traditions that arise from such locations as Nigeria, India, South Africa, the West Indies, and multicultural London.

Among the concerns raised in these works produced upon the collapse of the colonial world order are: Western travel and primitivism; decolonization and national allegories; authenticity and the invention of tradition; immigrant dreams; constructions of race; women and the nation; adolescence and the novel of education; nostalgia. Lectures and readings will offer background on such topics as the British Empire and its decline, national independence movements. cosmopolitanism, Orientalism, and the role of intellectuals bearing witness to history in the twentieth century. All the major works, and the focus of our study, will be novels: our discussions will return repeatedly to literary questions such as the history and theory of the novel in world literature; the construction and re-construction of literary canons; the influence of modernism on postcolonial writing.

In addition to literary texts, selected films will offer a running visual experience throughout the semester, providing both popular and high-culture/art-film versions of the colonial and postcolonial situation.
With primary attention focused on novels by writers such as Achebe, Rudyard Kipling, Jean Rhys, Buchi Emecheta, J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, foremost throughout the semester will be the goal of appreciating and understanding the diversity and richness of extraordinarily beautiful, haunting, and provocative works of art.

Written work will include two formal essays of critical analysis and interpretation, film and reading journals, informal exploratory essays, and a midterm and final exam.