Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Advanced seminar on selected literary works as they intersect with and are shaped by issues of race. May be organized by theme, critical approach, historical period, or individual author. This course may be repeated for credit if a different topic is taught. Writing.

COURSE DETAILS:

Contemporary(ish) Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora
Over the past half century, much of the most historically, psychologically, and formally ambitious fiction in English has been written by brown people.  The same may be said of literary theory: by the 1990s, Indian diasporic thinkers such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak were being cited so ubiquitously that some Latin American and Caribbean writers complained that the whole idea of “postcolonial theory” didn’t apply to their work because it was too grounded in South Asian experience.  Because of its literary brilliance and theoretical impact, for at least four decades, no individual or institution has been able to claim a plausible commitment to “decolonization” without understanding—honouring—how this deeply cosmopolitan South Asian diasporic body of work has pushed back, often quite hard, against colonial and neocolonial ideas of “English literature.”  It may not be possible to do this story justice in only five novels by five writers whose lives and fiction move, usually easily but sometimes with great difficulty, across class and caste and among India, Britain, the U.S., and Canada, but we’ll try.  We’ll start in the postcolonial ferment of the 1980s, when Salman Rushdie was being hailed by many as the greatest living novelist.  As we trace the tradition forward through Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2013 novel The Lowland, we’ll ask to what degree that postcolonial paradigm still applies.  Do models of diaspora or globalization or postracialism now fit better?  Or does the lingering intergenerational trauma of British imperialism on brown people, from Delhi to London to Berkeley and Vancouver, make that model as relevant as ever?

Grading

Materials

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