English 607.44/517.64 - Perspectives: A Critical Review of Postcolonialism

Instructor:  Dr. Shaobo Xie

Friday, 10:00 - 12:30

Mail to: sxie [at] ucalgary [dot] ca

Course Description: 

Postcolonialism as one of the most varied, encompassing and controversial contemporary critical enterprises has caused no end of debate between its protagonists and antagonists. Aiming to make a critical review of postcolonial theory and criticism through engaging different perspectives, this course will organize readings and discussions along the following line of questions: What is postcolonialism?  What are its disciplinary boundaries, discursive strategies, and political agenda(s)? Where and when to locate its discursive and theoretical beginnings? What are its major contributions to the investigation of the effects of colonialism and its neglected areas of concern. Does the term "postcolonial" gloss over global power relations as critics like Shohat, Dirlik, and McClintock have argued?  Or, is postcolonial theory, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued recently, adequate only for rereading history, yet "entirely insufficient for theorizing contemporary global power"? If some of the recent developments in postcolonial theory and criticism have, as Benita Parry notes, "appeared concerned to rearticulate colonialism and its aftermath from a theoretical position freed from the categories of political theory, state formation and socio-economic relationships," then what self-critiques have been generated in postcolonial studies? What are the major challenges to postcolonial critics in the day of capitalist globalization when difference and differentiation are being deployed as strategies of economic and cultural neocolonization?  Students will be reading critics and theorists who champion postcolonial studies as well as those who are engaged in the ongoing debate on these issues.

Reading List

Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?"

Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, The Postcolonial Studies Reader

Selections from Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture

Selections from Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism.

Arif Dirlik, "The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism"

Simon During, "Postmodernism or Post-Colonialism Today"

Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Hall, Catherine, "Histories, Empires and the Postcolonial Moment"

Hall, Stuart.  "The Local and the Global"

Selections from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire

Abudal JanMohamed, "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature"

Ketu H. Katrak, "Decolonizing Culture: Toward a Theory for Postcolonial Women's Texts"

Selections from Neil Lazarus, The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses"

Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique

Gyan Prakash, "Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography"

Nagesh Rao, "'Neocolonialism' or 'Globalization'?: Postcolonial Theory and the Demands of Political Economy"

Roberto Fernandez Retamar , "Caliban Speaks Five Hundred Years Later"

Said, Orientalism

Said, Introduction to Culture and Imperialism

Ella Shohat, "Notes on the 'Postcolonial'"

Selections from Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

Selections from Robert Young, White Mythologies

Selections from Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction

Some of the required readings are journal articles and some are available in MacKimmie Library's Reserve Collection.

Each student will make one seminar presentation.  The written assignments will be a book review of 1500 words, and a research paper of 5000 words (If the course is to be double-numbered, the research paper for 500-level students will be 3500 words).

All assignments must be completed to receive a passing grade in the course.  Please read the attached statement on plagiarism.