ClassInfo

Between 1700 and the 1950s, as one West was being "won" from Native Americans here in the United States, another West dominated and reinvented the rest of the world. While African, Asian, Central and Eastern European, Ottoman, and U.S. empires claimed foreign territories as their own during this period, their regional ambitions were no match for the transcontinental reach of the empires of Western Europe, especially the French and the British. By 1914, fully 85 percent of the earth had become "Western" territory. From a world mapped by modern European empire and remapped by the decolonization struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, when most of the earth's peoples fought to regain self-determination, the globe as we know it was born. In this course, we will explore the imperial roots of our "global" world in literary and theoretical texts by writers from both colonizing and colonized cultures in Africa, the Arab world, South Asia, and Europe. Our discussions will focus on the cultural and psychological dynamics and the political economy of the world under empire, decolonization, and globalization; the debts of nationalism to colonialism, and of globalization to empire; and the imprint of colonialism on migrations and diasporas. We will ask many questions of what we read: Is there art after empire? How do the world's literatures engage colonial conquest, attraction and resistance to colonial power, and the politics of postcolonial nationhood? How do race, ethnicity, religion and secularity, class, gender, and language figure in these engagements? If empire is more alive today than dead, can we speak of the "postcolonial"? Readings will include novels by Achebe, Anand, Bey, Conrad, Salih, and Sidhwa; personal essays and poetry by Antoon, Boland, Erdrich, and Heaney; films by Mehta and Pontecorvo; and theoretical texts by Achebe, Bhabha, Brennan, Fanon, Pandey, Roy, Said, and Young. This course satisfies the Council on Liberal Education (CLE) Core requirement in Literature, the CLE Theme requirement in Global Perspectives, and the Writing Intensive Requirement.

Between 1700 and the 1950s, as one West was being "won" from Native Americans here in the United States, another West dominated and reinvented the rest of the world. While African, Asian, Central and Eastern European, Ottoman, and U.S. empires claimed foreign territories as their own during this period, their regional ambitions were no match for the transcontinental reach of the empires of Western Europe, especially the French and the British. By 1914, fully 85 percent of the earth had become "Western" territory. From a world mapped by modern European empire and remapped by the decolonization struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, when most of the earth's peoples fought to regain self-determination, the globe as we know it was born. In this course, we will explore the imperial roots of our "global" world in literary and theoretical texts by writers from both colonizing and colonized cultures in Africa, the Arab world, South Asia, and Europe. Our discussions will focus on the cultural and psychological dynamics and the political economy of the world under empire, decolonization, and globalization; the debts of nationalism to colonialism, and of globalization to empire; and the imprint of colonialism on migrations and diasporas. We will ask many questions of what we read: Is there art after empire? How do the world's literatures engage colonial conquest, attraction and resistance to colonial power, and the politics of postcolonial nationhood? How do race, ethnicity, religion and secularity, class, gender, and language figure in these engagements? If empire is more alive today than dead, can we speak of the "postcolonial"? Readings will include novels by Achebe, Anand, Bey, Conrad, Salih, and Sidhwa; personal essays and poetry by Antoon, Boland, Erdrich, and Heaney; films by Mehta and Pontecorvo; and theoretical texts by Achebe, Bhabha, Brennan, Fanon, Pandey, Roy, Said, and Young. This course satisfies the Council on Liberal Education (CLE) Core requirement in Literature, the CLE Theme requirement in Global Perspectives, and the Writing Intensive Requirement.