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Prerequisites: ENG-299T (any version)

Catalog An intensive foundational study of African, Arab, Persian, South Asian, and Caribbean literatures from 1857 to present, with focus on anti-colonial movements and the idealism of nationhood, euphoria of independence, and chaotic reality of failed or emergent states. Students will study the conflicted and contradictory roles played by the architects and visionaries of new postcolonial nations, the construction and deconstruction of the "colonized man" and ethnic identities, and the repercussions of neocolonialism. Postcolonial authors are paradoxically housed and unhoused, and they explore and critique the legacies of colonialism and the birth pangs of postcolonial nationhood with force, humor, play, and melancholia, and along the way, celebrate cultural confusion, decentering, fragmentation, hybridity, the cosmopolitan, and the (un)reclaimable self. We will study seminal postcolonial theoretical texts such as The Wretched of the Earth and Orientalism alongside postcolonial authors' representations of independence and nationalism and the struggle for identity and self-determination. Topics will include the Subcontinent partitions, the Iranian Revolution, pre- and post-Apartheid South Africa, and Arab nationalism. Students will study the culture, history, and politics of these regions through poetry, fiction, nonfiction, historical documents, and film. Texts may include A Bend in the River, Mother India (movie), An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, The Education of a British-Protected Child, Waiting for the Barbarians, and The Satanic Verses.