English 203

Other Readings and Media

See below.

Description

This course considers the relationship between the development of critical theory and the colonized and postcolonial worlds. It will ask how and where histories, cultures, and philosophies of the global south appear and intersect with continental philosophy. Rather than pursue this question genealogically, this course is invested in producing a nexus of inquiry through three sites of (post)coloniality – North Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, and East Asia – and a variety of reading practices and methodologies. If, as Tim Brennan has argued, “The telos of the imperial project is reached when the third-world subject is able to deconstruct the epistemic violence of colonialism only by way of Continental theory,” what are the politics and epistemologies that emerge from this consideration? What are its pitfalls? And what alternate ways of reading and thinking about literature, culture, politics, and affect might develop from thinking together the continental tradition and the colonial world?

Readings may include texts from Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, GWF Hegel, Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Mahasweta Devi, Ranajit Guha, and Jacques Derrida.

This course satisfies the Group 5 (20th Century) or Group 6 (Non-historical) requirement.