Postcolonial Literature

From about the end of World War II, the period now known as the "decolonization era” witnessed the gaining of political independence by many countries that used to be under British colonial rule. In this course we will read across a range of genres –fiction, drama, poetry, travel writing, and cultural criticism– by Anglophone writers from Africa and the Caribbean. Issues will include: cultural-nationalism, diaspora, globalization, and generational shifts. How do the writers explore such categories as class, gender, nation, and race? What interactions do the texts imagine between individual desires, on the one hand, and collective aspirations, on the other? Authors will include J. M. Coetzee, Saidiya Hartman, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Rhys, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, and Zoë Wicomb. Enrollment limited to 30.