Title: Postcolonial Literatures in English

PRQ:

                                                            I have crossed an ocean

                                                           I have lost my tongue

                                                           from the root of the old

                                                          one a new one has sprung.

                                                                              Grace Nichols

                                                       I is a long memoried woman

While Grace Nichols’s persona speaks powerfully about West African slaves’ loss of language during the Middle Passage, this poem also speaks for postcolonial peoples in former British colonies whose transformation of literature written in English has invigorated contemporary literatures.  At its height, England ruled what it considered a divinely ordained empire on which “the sun never set.”  As the empire spread, English language, history, culture, institutions, and customs were imposed on indigenous peoples in India, Australia, Ireland, parts of Africa, as well as regions of the Caribbean.  In the twentieth century, the empire fell as colonies struggled for true political, social, economic, and cultural independence.  This struggle continues even today because, as critic Helen Tiffin reminds us, “decolonization is a process, not an arrival.” 

In this course, we will study a variety of writers, such as Jean Rhys, Peter Carey, Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, Brian Friel, and Pauline Melville, who, in using their new English tongues, are in the process of claiming their own cultures even as they transform English literature.  As we study this diverse literature, we will attempt to come to terms with its revisionary nature, its approaches to narrative and aesthetics, its concerns with language, gender and sexualities, race/color, identity, nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization.  We will also address the following questions:  What is postcolonial literature? To what extent is the term postcolonial problematic?   Which critical debates do postcolonial writers and theorists engage in?  What is the nature of those debates?  Which aesthetic criteria do we use to evaluate/appreciate these new literatures?  How is literature a form of nation building?  Which historical and cultural events, anthropological findings, and religious beliefs inform our study?