Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Juxtaposes the narratives of imperial conquest and colonial resistance. May focus on one particular imperial history or compare several. May feature narratives of rebellion and independence, national and/or postcolonial identity, or imperial nostalgia. This course may be repeated for credit when different topics are offered. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

A World of Resistance: Voices from Asia, Africa, and the Americas
This course is inspired by the Martinican anticolonial thinker and revolutionary Frantz Fanon’s influential work, The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Specifically, this course draws on Fanon’s insights on the importance of stories and storytelling to resistance and liberation movements. Just as narratives of racial and cultural superiority were crafted and weaponized to justify and bolster imperial conquests, storytelling that is rooted in indigenous epistemologies, as Fanon argues, has the capacity to fuel and materialize the liberation of the colonized. Moreover, Fanon’s global emancipatory vision foregrounds the importance of sharing stories between cultures and peoples through the compelling connections he draws across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. He asserts that it is these border-crossing stories that remind colonized people that they “are not alone. Despite the efforts of colonialism, their frontiers remain permeable to news and rumors” (30). The “news and rumors” Fanon refers to are the stories of resistance to empire that ripple through the world amongst other subjugated peoples, sparking hope and courage.

In this course, we will look across literary forms and film that speak to these two themes from around the world. Beginning in the western region of this continent with contemporary literary resistance to empire, we will examine the poetry of Ktunaxa transmasculine poet Smokii Sumac’s recent collection Born Sacred: Poems for Palestine (2025) to ground the course. We will follow with a fictionalized historical narrative, Rudyard Kipling’s short story, “The Man Who Could Be King” (1888), about imperial conquest gone awry in an Asiatic mountain range. Through drama, Aimé Césaire will bring us to the Caribbean in a postcolonial retelling of a famous renaissance play. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) will further nuance and complicate our discussion on empire and resistance with a focus on post-independence Nigeria of the 1960s. The second novel of the course, Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) will bring us a more contemporary story of the fallout of western imperialism in west Asia. Our last text uses the graphic novel form to examine another intimate experience with imperialism and war through the coming-of-age story of a young Vietnamese boy in the early 1960s in Such a Lovely Little War (2016). And finally, we will come full circle back to a resistance movement that profoundly impacted Fanon with the film The Battle of Algiers (1966), a story of the Algerian struggle for liberation against French colonialism.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

• Smokii Sumac. Born Sacred. (Poetry)
• Rudyard Kipling. “The Man Who Could Be King.” (Short Story)
• Aimé Césaire. A Tempest. (Play)
• Ahmed Saadawi. Frankenstein in Baghdad. (Novel)
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Half of a Yellow Sun. (Novel)
• Marselino Truong. Such a Lovely Little War. (Graphic Novel)
• Gillo Pontecorvo. The Battle of Algiers. (Film)

REQUIRED READING NOTES: