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Fall 2008
ENGL 376  Postcolonial Studies
TTH 10:50-12:05
Instructor: Clarke, Joseph

In October and November of 2005 the international media feasted on reports of riots in the “suburbs” of Paris. For about a month, prior to these news stories, there had been a series of unexplained, unsolved cases of arson, also in the suburbs of Paris. What both situations had in common was their location: in major French cities like Paris, the suburbs tend to be populated by immigrants and also tend to be discussed as one discusses “the inner city” in the US. Thus, the suburbs are understood to be violent places where there is no rule of law and “culture” has essentially broken down. In the case of France, the “immigrants” in question are almost all from North Africa and West Africa places which were once part of France’s colonial empire.  So what are these immigrants doing in France? In Austria?  In England?  And why am I, a British born Jamaican, living and working in Houston Texas? Part of the answer has to do with a phenomenon captured by the word “postcolonial.” With the breakup of the French, Portugese, British, Dutch, and German empires after WWII (one of the meanings of the “post” in postcolonial) global recessions combined with the political legacies left in the former European colonies sent people from these places on the move to places like Paris, London, New York and in my case, Houston.

Under the rubric of what has come to be called “postcolonial studies,” this course will explore the texts, contexts and subtexts of the preceding paragraph.  I’m not one to toot my own horn, but postcolonial studies is one of the most exciting fields in contemporary English studies. We will try to restrict ourselves to the former colonies of Europe in Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. We will begin by looking at the encounter of “Europe” with the “unknown world,” in the Seventeenth century and then move to a discussion of one of the first critical templates in the field, namely “the empire writing back.” From there we will look at some of the formative literary and theoretical debates in the field about the adequacy of the term postcolonial; the differential nature of colonialism; the problem of standard languages and there relationships to Creole languages; the rise of nationalism its critique and finally the notion of “globalization.” We will probably read Daniel Defoe (UK), Aphra Behn (UK), Khushwant Singh(India),  Driss Chraibi, Assia Djebar (France/Algeria), Chimamanda Adichie (US/Nigeria), Zakes Mda (South Africa), Driss Chraibi (France/Morocco), Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Earl Lovelace (Trinidad), Hanif Kureishi (UK), Nuruddin Farah (Somalia), V. Y. Mudimbe (D. R. Congo), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria).

There will be a midterm exam, a take-home final and two short essays.