Please note that this seminar starts in the second week of term!
Primary Texts:
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Purple Hibiscus. London: Fourth Estate, [2004] 2013.
Desai, Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss. London: Penguin, 2006.
Jones, Lloyd. Mr Pip. New York: The Dial Press, [2007] 2008.
Participants are expected to buy the texts in the editions given above.
Theory and Secondary Literature:
Anderson, Margaret L., and Patricial Hill Collins. “Why Race, Class, and Gender Still Matter.” Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology. Eds. Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2013. 1-15.
Dyer, Richard. White. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Pages 1-40.
Hall, Stuart. “The Spectacle of the Other.” Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Ed. Stuart Hall. London: Sage, 1997. Pages 239-279.
Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pages 22-44.
Miles, Robert, and Malcolm Brown. Racism. 2 ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Pages 88-113.
Spielman, D.W. “'Solid Knowledge' and Contradictions in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 51.1 (2010): 74-89.
Tunca, Daria. “Ideology in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (2003).” English Text Construction 2.1 (2009): 121-131.
Wallace, C.R. “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and the Paradoxes of Postcolonial Redemption.” Christianity and Literature, Special Issue “African Narrative and the Christian Tradition” Spring 61.3 (2012): 465-483.
These texts or the respective articles will be mandatory for the seminar and will be available online at the beginning of term.
Veranstaltungsbeschreibung:
Race has probably been one of the most controversial concepts in critical discussions of the last fifty years. In this discussion, three general camps can roughly be ascertained. The first group claims that race is a term that should be “consigned to the dustbin of analytically useless terms” (Miles 2003: 90). The second group claims that race is a concept with dangerous ideological baggage that has never had purely descriptive functions. However, these scholars also stress that race is still part of common sense knowledge and everyday language and must therefore be analysed ‘as race’. The third group of scholars shares the view that race still has powerful effects on today’s society and thought, but this school is more critical of going on with using the problematic term race. Concepts that have been proposed as alternatives are the terms ethnicity and racialisation.
The seminar will discuss and define the concepts of race, ethnicity and racialisation and the problems that these concepts have posed for researchers. Here, we will also address the historical emergence of racial theories and scientific racism from the eighteenth century onwards and the role that racial theories about white and non-white people and their origins have played in this effort to categorise humankind.
In the seminar, we will use these concepts and theoretical approaches to analyse contemporary Anglophone novels that deal with issues of skin colour and power hierarchies, racism and discrimination, identity crises and (post)colonialist identity constructions. Among others, we will address the following questions:
- What notions of race and ethnicity are relevant in the contemporary Anglophone novel? Are they refuted or reinforced?
- How do narrative structures and the representation of different protagonists in these novels reflect conflicts like racism, colonialism, transcultural contact and struggles with identity?
- Are there differences between reflections of race and ethnicity in novels from regions that are as diverse as New Zealand, India or Africa?
Leistungsanforderungen:
Regular attendance and active participation in the discussion as well as in the group work is expected.
Weitere Hinweise: Seminar findet in englischer Sprache statt. |
