01 TTH5 CAC 33522 GARLAND SC-205
Postcolonial Literatures—critical and imaginative writings influenced by the shared experiences of empires, colonizations, and imperialisms (cultural, economic, and political as well as their antagonistic counterparts) of a global humanity in English and other languages—affect, embrace, and interpellate more individuals and societies than any other subset in the discipline of literary studies working today. Recently, multiple concepts of “planetarity” have emerged into a hydra-headed struggle of signification as vexed responses, complements, supplements, adversaries, and/or alternatives to the equally problematic discourses of globalization. How do theorists of these multiple notions of planetarity trouble the fields of postcolonial and global literatures?
In this course we will read both contemporary exponents of planetarity and past literary expressions and projections of the planet that challenge the abstractions of the all too familiar tools of empire and globalization: mapping and mastery, capital and control. Readings *may* include excerpts from Gayatri Spivak’s Death of a Discipline, Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia, and Wai Chee Dimock's Through Other Continents as well as essays, novels, stories, and poems from World Anglophone and translated writers including: Aime Cesaire, Mahasweta Devi, Nurrudin Farrah, Maxine Hong Kingston, Nathaniel Mackey, Jose Marti, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Derek Walcott, Virginia Woolf, and Walt Whitman.
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