English 376-A: Studies in Colonial and Anti-Colonial Literature: Postcolonial Reimagination

Taking Edward Said's stress on unlearning dominant modes of recording history and Achille Mbembe's work on a sense of futurity through the "recreation of humanity" as its ignition, this course will explore efforts to reimagine cultures, nations, selves, and global relations in a wide range of postcolonial literature and theory. We will focus especially on the risks in such reimagining, and interrogate the rapidly canonized relations of virtuous self-silencing and the production of neologisms in anti-colonial arguments. Alongside arguments by Said and Mbembe, we will study works by Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Rabindranath Tagore, Salman Rushdie, Isabella Hammad, Ishion Hutchinson, and Anuk Arudpragasam, among others.