English 100

Other Readings and Media

The booklist for this class has not been finalized, but will include several of the following texts: Rhys, J.: Voyage in the Dark; Selvon, S.: The Lonely Londoners; Naipaul, V.S.: The Mimic Men; MacInnes, C.: City of Spades; Lessing, D.: In Pursuit of the English; Dunn, N.: Up the Junction; Emecheta, B.: Second-Class Citizen; Rushdie, S.: The Satanic Verses; Headley, V.: Yardie; Ali, M.: Brick Lane; and a course reader

Description

"Throw away your A to Z Street Atlas--we'll find our way around London this semester with a different set of guides. Our reading will foreground a series of narratives of colonial and postcolonial figures at loose in twentieth-century London. We'll consider the prevalence of tropes of voyaging, exploration, and adventure in their texts, and ask what they reveal about the uses of the city: both as a site of self-making and self-mastery, and as an arena in which to discover and confront the imperial past. Alongside these texts we'll read the work of contemporary journalists and sociologists responding to the changing face of post-1945 London. The course reader will include work by poets (Fred D'Aguiar, Una Marson), urban sociologists (Georg Simmel, St. Clair Drake, Young and Wilmott, Michael Banton), insurgent intellectuals (Claudia Jones, A. Sivanandan), and literary and cultural critics (Franco Moretti, Elizabeth Wilson, Sukhdev Sandhu). Time permitting, we'll also view a handful of films (""Sapphire,"" ""Young Soul Rebels,"" and ""Dirty Pretty Things""). "