Syllabus 2024/25

Week One: Caste and Nation

Mahatma Gandhi, Hind SwarajLink opens in a new window (1909)

B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of CasteLink opens in a new window (1936) - just the main text, we will cover Arundhati Roy's intro next week.

 

Week Two: Caste and Indigeneity

Arundhati Roy, "The Doctor and the Saint"Link opens in a new window (intro to the Verso edition of Annihilation of Caste)

Dalit Camera, "An Open Letter to Ms. Arundhati Roy", Roundtable India, March 15 2014Link opens in a new window

Mahasweta Devi, “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and PirthaLink opens in a new window in Imaginary Maps: Three Stories by Mahasweta Devi, ed. Gayatri Spivak (London: Routledge, 1993)

Week Three: Enlightenment and its Discontents (1) - Slavery and Revolution

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938; London: Penguin, 2001) - Any edition published 1963 and after is fine.

David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke UP, 2004)Link opens in a new window: prologue and Ch.1.

Week Four: Enlightenment and its Discontents (2) - Colonialism and Reaction

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950; New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000)Link opens in a new window

Suzanne Césaire, "1943: Surrealism and Us" and "The Great Camouflage" from The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent 1941-45, ed. Daniel L. Maximin (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012)

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; London: Penguin, 2017): ch.7 "Race and Bureaucracy" and ch9. "The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man".

Week Five: Decolonization and National Culture

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961; London: Penguin, 2001) - any edition is fine

Neil Lazarus, “Disavowing Decolonization: Fanon, Nationalism, and the Problematic of Current Theories of Colonial Discourse”, Research in African Literatures 24, no. 4 (1993): 69-98.Link opens in a new window

Week 6: Narrating Decolonization

Ayei Kwei Amrah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (Pearson, 1989)

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “The Language of African Literature”, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (1993; London: Routledge, 2013)Link opens in a new window

Week 7: Blackness and the Promise of Diaspora

Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954) - photocopies of selections to be provided (or you can purchase as part of the collection Three Books from Exile if you want your own copy)

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007; London: Serpent's Tail, 2021): prologue, ch1. "Afrotopia", ch 6. "So Many Dungeons".

Week 8: Race in Theory (From Anti- to Post-Colonial?)

Frantz Fanon, "The Fact of Blackness"Link opens in a new window, from Black Skin White Masks (1952; London: Pluto, 2008).

G.W.F. Hegel, "Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage"Link opens in a new window, from The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977)

Homi K. Bhaba, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse", October 28 (1984): 125-33.

Kevin Ochieng Okoth, "The Flatness of Blackness: Afro-Pessimism and the Erasure of Anti-Colonial Thought", Salvage, January 16, 2020.Link opens in a new window

Week 9: Creolization

Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1990; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997) - Selections to be provided: Pt1. "Approaches", Pt2. "Paths".

Enrique Dussel, "Eurocentrism and Modernity", boundary 2, vol. 20, no. 3 (1993): 65-76.Link opens in a new window 

Maria Lugones, 'Toward a Decolonial Feminism', Hypatia, vol. 25, no. 4 (2010): 742-759.Link opens in a new window

Sylvia Wynter, "Novel and History, Plot and Plantation", Savacou 5

Week 10: Settler Colonialism

Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (1973; New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997).Link opens in a new window

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, "Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization", The South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 1: 95-109.