Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines how literature and language work to reflect, perform, complicate, and critique constructions of race, ethnicity, and national and diasporic identities and spaces. May draw from post-colonial approaches, critical race theory, and Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies. May be further organized by historical period, genre, or critical approach. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

Colonial and Decolonial Space-making

The Indonesian poet Khairani Barokka writes that “Prolific, private division of land was: mass of colonists’ decision /[…] A sectioning off of home as chattel.” In her seminal work Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), the Chicana feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa declares that, “the skin of the earth is seamless.” These visions of land and space in and beyond the brutal strictures of colonization form the backbone of this course.

Together we will read literary texts that critique and resist the centuries of colonial and settler colonial space-making that have dispossessed, ruined, ruptured, and attempted to eradicate the lands, waters, and lifeworlds of the colonized. We will discuss concepts of space, territory, and ecology in the context of colonial violence and decolonial reclamations. What is the relationship between land and power? What are the long aftermaths of drawing arbitrary borders? How do we document the ecological ruination that occurs through occupation? What possible decolonial and anticolonial futures might we imagine?

In addition to a screening and discussion of Tasha Hubbard’s latest documentary film Singing Back The Buffalo (2024), we will read an eclectic selection of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry that spring from Pakistan, Palestine, Indonesia, and the unceded Indigenous lands on which we live. We may also read shorter excerpts of postcolonial and decolonial theories of Frantz Fanon, Walter Mignolo, Graham Huggan, Elizabeth Deloughrey, Ann Laura Stoler, Leanne Simpson, and Edward Said.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

At the end of the class, students will be able to demonstrate they know how to

• read literary works from a range of genres and identify major and minor themes and literary techniques
• define terms relevant to literature in general and concepts specific to the course
• close read a text, paying attention to literary forms, narrative perspective, and other literary strategies
• understand and discuss the contexts of literary works
• prepare essay outlines that clearly set out a plan for an argumentative essay of literary critique
• write literary analysis for both a single text and for a comparison of two texts

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Required readings will not be available at the SFU bookstore. Please support your local independent or used bookstores, or purchase the texts online. Digital copies of the texts are permitted. Some of these texts are also available through the SFU WAC Bennett Library and the public library system.

Other shorter readings will be available on Canvas

If financial hardship prevents you from purchasing copies of any of the texts, please contact me in advance of the course.

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: