English 190

Book List

Abani, Chris: Graceland; Chandra, Vikram: Love and Longing in Bombay; Channer (ed): Kingston Noir; Cole, Teju: Open City; O'Neill, Joseph: Netherland; Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa: Harlem is Nowhere; Smith, Zadie: White Teeth; Vladislavic, Ivan: Portrait With Keys: Johannesburg Unlocked

Other Readings and Media

Course Reader will provide critical reading as well as other fictional texts.

Films: Nair, Salaam Bombay; Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire; Henzell, The Harder They Come; Hood, Tsotsi; Van der Haak, Lagos/Koolhas; Elgood and Letts, Dancehall Queen 

Description

For reasons to do with some of its most canonical texts (Achebe’s Things Fall Apart being the most proffered example), postcolonial literature is often thought to present a conflict between “tradition” and “modernity,” a conflict sometimes imaged as the peaceful village intruded upon by the demands of the bustling metropolis. As it turns out, urban landscapes are key staging grounds for the terms, claims, and experiences of postcoloniality. With case studies from very different cities—Kingston, Lagos, Bombay, London, and New York—we will explore how writers and artists present postcolonial subjects creating, making use of, and contending with metropolitan spaces. Here writers and artists use urban settings to open up conversations around history, empire, identity, and belonging. Course themes will include creolization and hybridity; ritual and performance; the politics and meaning of wandering; the politics and aesthetics of space; gender and sexuality; and yes, even tradition and modernity, but remixed. An open and on-going question concerns the relevance of the term postcolonial in the US space, which students will be able to explore in a research paper on the Bay Area.