Postcoloniality and Globalism

This seminar is an introduction to postcolonial theory: its precursors, key figures, and ongoing configurations in anglophone literary studies. Starting with Stuart Hall’s provocative question posed in a 1996 essay –“When was the post-colonial?”– we will ask why it became possible to name an intellectual current “postcolonial” in the 1990s. We will consider how literary and cultural criticism got to the moment of Hall’s intervention, and where we currently are in terms of archives and the aims of postcolonial humanistic inquiry. Readings will move between theoretical and literary texts, allowing us to explore how theory and literature can enrich or complicate one another. Issues to be addressed include: modernity, cultural nationalism, racialization, and the idea of “literature” itself, understood as motion of critique. Authors will include: Bhabha, Césaire, Chow, Fanon, Hartman, Morrison, Said, Salih, Spillers, Spivak, Walcott, Wicomb, Wynter.