English 150

Other Readings and Media

Shakespeare, W.: The Tempest; Cesaire, A.: A Tempest; Edwards, P.: Equiano?s Travels; Haley, A.: The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Rhys, J.: Wide Sargasso Sea; Kincaid, J.: A Small Place; Hagedorn, J.: Dogeaters; Emecheta, B.: The Joys of Motherhood; Santiago, E.: America?s Dream; Ali, M.: Brick Lane

Description

Processes of globalization ostensibly have wrought economic interdependence, as well as mutual intelligibility, among a newly-integrated world citizenry. Literary studies has kept apace with this re-organization of people?s experiences by tracing previous cultural exchanges as well as commenting on the current, radically accelerated global flows of people, ideas, and commodities. The focus of this course is on particularly powerful and well-traveled ideas of freedom, as they have been imagined in key literary texts, which both critique as well as participate in global flows of communication. These texts have been selected for their canonical status as well as for their attempts to record, challenge, and/or re-imagine gendered, raced, and class struggles under increasingly globalized regimes of power. These texts ?speak? not only to each other, but also to the stories otherwise silenced by official celebrations of globalization.