“Any real understanding of ourselves and our existing
cultures calls for an attempt to understand colonialism and what it did and is
still doing to us. This understanding would better equip us to control or
exorcise it so that, in the words of the Maori poet Hone Tuwhare, we can
dream good dreams again, heal the wounds it inflicted on us and with the
healing will return pride in ourselves—an ingredient so vital to creative
nation-building. Pride, self-respect, self-reliance will help us cope so much
more creatively with what is passing or to come.”
–Albert Wendt, “Towards a New
Oceania”
Class Description
The goal of this course is to
introduce students to postcolonial literature. We will read a selection of
novels, poetry and short stories by writers in the United States, the
Caribbean, Africa, and Oceania alongside critical essays, to help us engage
with and better understand colonialism and its past and continuing impacts on
places, people, and cultures. With each text, we will ask how colonialism has shaped
our political, economic, geographic, and social realities, and discuss the role
of literature in the work of decolonization and imagining alternative futures.
We will grapple with terms such as postcolonialism, neocolonialism, settler
colonialism, and the decolonial, and work to identify our own stakes in these
conversations.
Required Texts:
·Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
·Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
·Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place
·Albert Wendt, Black Rainbow
·Brandy Nālani McDougall, The
Salt Wind Ka Makani Pa‘akai
Course Requirements:
·Active class participation
·Close readings/reading responses
·Mid-term and final papers (6 pages)
·Short presentations