Introduction

This course will focus on introducing the postcolonial aspects of Global Literature. The term "postcolonial" has become a hot term in literary debates and in a number of other fields as well. The term refers to the type of cultural production that started to take place in many formerly colonized nations when the European empires began to be dismantled in the 1940's, but particularly after the anti-imperialist struggles that occurred in the 1960’s. However, the term has also come to mean a number of other political, cultural, and economic formations having to do with, among other things, new ways people are responding to the world capitalistic order, how local cultures and concerns interact within increasingly consolidated world systems, environmentalism, new technologies, global feminism, identity politics, new relations between private and public power, the dismantling of the welfare state alongside the growth in corporate power, and the like. Postcolonialism is, as well, a field of theory which developed with so-called "Third World" intellectuals residing in the "Western" academy, and touches on issues ranging from world migrations and diasporas to area studies, resistance movements, regionalisms, consumerism and the production of "ethnic" identities, post-industrial transformations in labor, media society, the politics of race and gender worldwide, and the like.

In the current political climate, it is vital to understand how imperial power operates, how people live within it, and how people have formed resistances to it. This course will mix literature, theory, and film in order to explore what shapes power, what constitutes justice, what are the relationships being forged between the center and the periphery, between consumer culture’s increasing need for energy and the rising nationalisms in the "Third World". How is culture responding to these changes, and what are the future possibilities for democracy?

Note: The course deals with the economic and politcal structures that form a background for any literary production. So please keep an open mind and do not feel intimidated by the larger questions that may arise in this course. I will be happy to engage in an open-minded exchange of ideas.