THIS COURSE SAME AS 195:336

01-Passages from India: South Asian Postcolonial and Migrant writers

 Over the last fifty years, postcolonial and migrant writers from South Asia have transformed the literary, cultural and political landscapes of the West.  Through innovative and subversive narrative  and  rhetorical strategies they have remapped the colonial past and redefined their locations in transnational  postcolonial contexts.  This course will  explore V.S.Naipaul’s fraught negotiations in the early sixties as a Trinidadian in the shadow of British colonialism through a reading of The Mimic Men;  Salman Rushdie’s mythical journey into the effects and consequences  of  the partition of India in Midnight’s Children; the ways the half  Pakistani/ half English Hanif Kureishi evokes the racial cultural clashes of London through the music, sexual experimentation  and consumerism of the seventies and eighties in The Buddha of Suburbia ; and Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome in which connections among colonial  England and India , a futuristic New York and Calcutta take place in a cyberspace where the postcolonial meets the postmodern.  Turning to the very different context and experiences of diasporic women writers we will discuss the challenge to traditional roles of women and gendered identities in postcolonial Western contexts in Chitra Divakaruni’s mix of magic and realism in the California of Mistress of Spices,  Bharati Mukherjee’s espousal of the American dream in Jasmine ;  Monica Ali’s  depiction of a Bangladeshi immigrant woman in post 9/11 London  in Brick Lane ;  and, finally,  Shani Mootoo’s  story of madness and healing among post indentured Trinidadian Indians in Cereus Blooms at Night.

In  addition to these primary texts we will refer to seminal essays on postcolonialism by Homi Bhabha, Salman Rushdie, Sara Suleri and Bill Ashcroft.

Proposed texts :

V.S. Naipaul, Mimic Men

Chitra Divakaruni, Mistress of Spices

Bharati Mukherjee,  Jasmine

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

 Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia

Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome

Monica Ali,  Brick Lane

Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night