2022-23

Second Assessed Essay Topics

Please check Tabula for your essay deadlines. Late submissions will incur a penalty of 5 marks per day.

 Note: Please consult the Department website and/or the Student Handbook for guidance on essay submission and citations. Your essays must be 1.5 or double-spaced, with page numbers clearly marked. Please also make note of the Departmental regulations on Plagiarism.

For all bibliographic citations, primary and secondary, use the MLA Guidelines, a link to which is provided on the Department webpage for Undergraduate Studies.

Please save an electronic copy of your essay until final results are announced. You might also want to save it for future reference, or if you intend to study beyond the B.A. degree.

Finalists: You need to craft your own essay titles in consultation with your module tutor. Your essays need to be 3,000 words in length. You may draw upon any of the questions before.

Write a 2,500-word essay on any one of the following topics:

 

1. Write an essay on the limitations of the colonial archive as explored in Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, with reference to any two of the literary texts you have read this term.
2. Using Joan Scott’s theorisation of “experience” as your sounding board, write an essay exploring the representation of women’s experiences in any two texts read this term.
3. Explore the representation of “veil” in any two texts read this term.
4. Discuss the ways in which the question of women’s body/ies becomes a site of transnational politics (colonial and/or nationalist/postcolonial) in any two of texts you read this term.
5. Write an essay on the possibilities as well as limits for transnational feminism in the twenty-first century with reference to any two texts (literary or theoretical) of your choice that you read this term.

 

First Assessed Essay Topics

Please check Tabula for Essay Deadline. Late submissions will incur a penalty of 5 marks per day.

Only the Director of Undergraduate Studies can approve extensions to the deadline.

Note: Please consult the Department website and/or the Student Handbook for guidance on essay submission and citations. Please also make note of the Departmental regulations on Plagiarism.

Your essays must be double-spaced, in 12 font and with reasonable margins.

You are not required to do secondary research for this assessment. However, for all bibliographic citations, primary and secondary, use the MLA Guidelines, a link to which is provided on the Department webpage for Undergraduate Studies.

Please save a copy of your essay until final results are announced. You might also want to save it for future reference, or if you intend to study beyond the B.A. degree.

 

All Finalists need to devise their own topics in consultation with me. They are required to write a 3,000 word essay on their chosen topic.

 

Second Years: Write a 2,500-word essay on any one of the following topics:

 

1. Write an essay exploring the figuration of Anna Morgan in terms of the historical figure of Sara Bartman and the racist iconography of the Hottentot Venus in Jean Rhys’s novel The Voyage in the Dark. You may draw upon Sander Gilman’s essay to sketch your argument.

 

2. In his essay on “The Nation and its Women”, Partha Chatterjee argues that under colonial rule in India, the question of the “new woman” was formulated by the native elites as a question of “coping with change”, especially the changes brought about by education and migration to cities. Write an essay analyzing how Tagore represents Bimala as a “new woman” in his novel The Home and the World. What characteristics does she embody of the “new woman”?

 

3. Grewal in her essay “The Culture of Travel” argues that the concept-metaphor of the home and the world was constitutive of colonial modernity, or of how modernity was experienced in the colonies. Combine your analysis of Grewal’s arguments with one other text read this term to explore this idea.

 

 

4. Ann McClintock in her essay writes of the doubled figure of the nurse/mother that represents what we could interpret in terms of a theory of social reproduction—the unwaged upper-class woman (mother) vs the waged working-class woman (nurse). Develop this argument using McClintock and one other theorist/writer you have read this term (Mohanty, Mies, Tagore or Kincaid).

 

5. Using the arguments made by Visweswaran, explore the limits and possibilities of feminist research as a source of solidarity within transnational feminism. You may bring in a text (literary, visual, any genre) from outside the prescribed readings or choose a reading from this term to critically assess Visweswaran’s practice as an anthropologist and compare it to the work that literary or cultural analysis does.

 

 

6. Memories of home seem to fill Lucy with feelings of rage and sadness. Write an essay exploring how the idea of home is undone in Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy, providing new insights for transnational feminism.

 

7. “As a mestiza, I have no country”, writes Gloria Anzaldua in her book Borderlands. Discuss the significance of this statement to transnational feminist theory and practice as iterated in Anzaldua’s text.