English 173

Description

This course will screen and examine a series of films that focus on the nature and structure of Western colonialism and postcolonialism.  We will study the different forms of colonialism, as depicted from various perspectives, as well as the social, political, economic, and aesthetic valences that constitute the long history of colonialism.  We will examine the struggle between imperial ideology (the contradiction between the deployment of power and the attempts to justify the morality of that deployment) and the indigenous attempts to resist that ideology.

Films will be chosen from the following:  Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (Isaac Julien), Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo), Burn (Gillo Pontecorvo), Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola), The Mission (Roland Joffe), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (Stephen Frears), Chocolat (Claire Denis), The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach), Xala (Ousemane Sembene), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Mira Nair), The Constant Gardner (Fernando Meirelles), A Dry White Season (Euzhan Palcy), The Year of Living Dangerously (Peter Weir), The Quiet American (Phillip Noyce), Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean), Bend It Like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha), A Passage to India (David Lean), selections from A Jewel in the Crown (Jim O’Brien & Christopher Morahan), etc.