English 140 - Spring, 2014

Topics in Postcolonial Literatures & Culture

Class Information

Instructor: Roy, Parama
CRN: 42900
Time: TR 4:40-6:00
Location: 106 Olson

Description

ENL 140: Postcolonial Fictions of Emergency, Violence, and Terror

This course will examine representations of political emergency, violence, terror, insurgency, civil war, and occupation in a range of imperial and postcolonial fictions spanning a century and encompassing a range of locales and contexts–anarchism in late nineteenth-century imperial London; civil war in Nigeria; apartheid and its aftermath in South Africa; the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank; and the global normalization of the post 9/11 “war on terror,” especially in its Pakistani and U.S. theaters of action. Topics include: revolutionary violence as anti-colonial critique; friendship and enmity; “just war”: despotic states, liberal states, and political repression; trauma and witnessing; gender and violence; and terror and democracy. In addition to novels and graphic fictions by Joseph Conrad, J.M. Coetzee, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Joe Sacco, and Mohsin Hamid, we will read some of the major statements on decolonization, violence, empire, and the postcolony by Frantz Fanon, M.K. Gandhi, Talal Asad, and Achille Mbembe.

Grading

One short paper (5 pages); one long paper (8 pages); take-home final; reading quizzes; attendance and participation, including posts to SmartSite forums.

Texts

The Secret Agent, ed. Tanya Agathathocleous, Joseph Conrad
Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Palestine, Joe Sacco
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist