This course familiarizes students with the perspectives, debates, and attitudes that characterize the contemporary field of postcolonial theory, with critical attention to how its interdisciplinary formation contributes to reading literary works.

What are the claims made on behalf of literary texts in orienting us to other lives and possibilities, and in registering the experiences of displacement under global capital? To better answer this, we read recent scholarship that engages the field in conversations around affect, climate change, human rights and democracy, to think about the impulses that animate the field, and to outline its possible futures.

We begin by surveying the trajectories of the field, particularly as it developed around debates on revolution or compromise, cosmopolitanism, the psychology of colonialism, anti-colonial historiography, and the aesthetics of dislocation/diaspora/exile. Alongside this, we consider the nagging sense within the field of its own precariousness, and the disciplinary revival of the category of “world literature”.

We will read works by David Palumbo-Liu, Debjani Ganguly, Sara Ahmed, Amitav Ghosh, David Scott, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Chinua Achebe, Arundhati Roy, Richard Powers, Arun Kolatkar, and M’NourbeSe Philips.