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In an interview with Elizabeth Grosz, Gayatri C. Spivak called “unlearning” a fundamental component of a postcolonial pedagogy (“unlearning of one’s own privileges as a loss”, Spivak 1990: 14). This course provides an overview of postcolonial key concepts which emerged from different geographical locations and histories of colonial contact but share reservations about (cultural) binaries. In this context, literary writing itself is considered a driving force in the formation of postcolonial concepts, a catalyst for “unlearning binaries”. Literary representations of intercultural contact range from renunciation and reinterpretation to assimilation and blending of cultural identities, always expanding aesthetic categories in a form of postcolonial intertextuality: beginning with a discussion of intertextual modes of writing back, we will read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and postcolonial responses to the text such das David Dabydeen’s The Intended. We will also discuss the relational Caribbean poetics of Édouard Glissant in Derek Walcott’s epic poem “The Schooner Flight”. Moreover, we will discuss British postcolonial writing, such as Jackie Kay’s Trumpet and a short story from the collection Too Asian, Not Asian Enough edited by Kavita Bhanot. Finally, we will turn to transnational authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Afropolitan novel Americanah, set in the United States, London and Lagos. By positioning these generically diverse literary texts in relation to key terms, such as Homi Bhabha’s hybridity, Stuart Hall’s new ethnicities, Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and the more recent Afropolitanism (Mbembe and Nuttall 2004), we will interrogate the shifts in conceptualisations of cultures, postcoloniality, Blackness and diaspora as well as in the aesthetic framing of intertextuality.
Recommended Reading:
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (please use a critical edition such as Penguin or Oxford UP)
David Dabydeen: The Intended
Jackie Kay: Trumpet
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Americanah
A digital reader on Moodle with relevant secondary material will be provided at the beginning of the course. It is strongly recommended to read at least some of the texts before the new semester starts.
Lektürekurs: Close reading of (additional) texts.
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