Reading & Composition

In the mid-20th century, national liberation movements and indigenous wars of independence reconfigured the world as European colonial regimes crumbled and new nation-states emerged throughout the globe. And yet the racial capitalism that coloniality inaugurated continued unabated. In this course we will focus our attention on the “post-colonial,” a critical term that arose in the wake of these events and that is still used to define our current moment. As a concept, the post-colonial implies the establishment of a new historical order in the wake of occupation, even as the term preserves this colonial past as the defining feature of all that follows. In other words, the “post-” signifies not only an aftermath, but also a (quite literal) attachment to what came before, suggesting colonialism’s continuation and persistence in the present. In the lingering shadow of the colonial, what happens to imagination, to politics, to community—to life itself? What effect does this temporal rupture-that-is-not-a-rupture have on our understanding of history and sense of the future?

In order to grapple with this question, we will focus primarily on 20th-century films and literature from Africa and the Middle East, as well as work from black and indigenous writers and filmmakers in the US. We will also consider how these ideas about violence and justice, memory and memorialization, exhaustion and resistance manifest in our current times(s): in the so-called migrant crisis; in the waves of anti-government uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East since 2010; in the global “statue wars”; and in the Afrofuturism-mania inspired by Black Panther.

This course is designed to help students develop critical thinking, writing, and oral expressions skills that will be applicable in your many fields of study. Through the drafting and revision of several essays of increasing length, you will learn how to develop cogent analytical arguments and how to research and incorporate scholarly materials in the development of these arguments, while shorter informal writing assignments will help you think through the course material and prepare for class discussion. As this is a discussion-based course, we will place a strong emphasis on active student participation in class.

Possible films include:

Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers (1966)

Ousmane Sembène, Black Girl (1966)

Assia Djebar, Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting (1982)

Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (1991)

Ziad Kalthoum, Taste of Cement (2016)

Ryan Coogler, Black Panther (2018)

Possible literary texts include:

Kateb Yacine, Nedjma (1956)

Emile Habibi, The Pessoptimist (1974)

Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1977)

Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy (1977)

A reader will include short literary and critical selections from Olaudah Equiano, Octavia Butler, Hassan Blasim, James Baldwin, Arwa Salih, Frantz Fanon, AiméCésaire, Karl Marx, Binyavanga Wainaina, Sylvia Wynter, James C. Scott, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, among others.