Studies in Contemporary Literature

In this course, we will read a number of texts that offer striking representations of bodies formed by a wide variety of colonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial contexts.  Our readings will allow us to consider a series of interrelated questions: how do these texts engage with and/or contest practices of racist classification and exoticist representation?  In what ways do their authors foreground bodies as texts upon which are written histories of political and cultural violence?  What links can be traced between bodies, language, and narrative?  How do bodies serve to authenticate and/or trouble imagined national communities?  In our discussions, we will bear in mind the historical specificity of each text while remaining open to insights made possible by reading comparatively.  In other words, our goal will not be to synthesize a monolithic theory of the body in colonial and postcolonial literature but rather to analyze individual texts while attempting to be attentive to common textual strategies, formal elements, and practices of representation.  In addition to selected secondary material, readings will likely include: Jehan Cendrieux, François Phuoc, métis, Kim Lefèvre, Métisse blanche, Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, Mayotte Capécia, Je suis Martiniquaise, Maryse Condé, Hérémakhonon, Ferdinand Oyono, Le vieux nègre et la médaille, Sony Labou Tansi, La vie et demie, Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India, Bessora, 53 cm.