02:30P-03:45P MW (30) 3 cr.
TOPIC: POST-COLONIAL WOMEN'S WRITING
This course will focus on women’s writing as it addresses histories of colonization, decolonization, and their legacies in the present. Our reading and discussions will be organized around three lines of inquiry. First, we will consider women’s position within colonial contexts, where the workings of indigenous patriarchy intersect and collide with the colonizers’ “modern” (or western) patriarchal norms. Second, we will investigate the roles women have played in movements of national liberation and the degree to which they have been served by their nation’s independence. Finally, we will attend to the mass migration that brought millions of formerly colonized peoples to the metropolitan centers of Europe and the U.S. (e.g., South Asian immigrants in Britain; Afro-Caribbeans in New York), focusing on women’s relation to these multicultural urban environments.
Throughout the course, we will explore how the feminist aims most widely cited and endorsed in the U.S. – for example, women’s right to individual self-realization; women’s aspiration to full participation in national life; the pursuit of redress through the law – are both adopted and rejected by women writing in and about (post-)colonial contexts. How has the experience of colonization, decolonization, and diaspora led these women to question, revise, or repudiate these aims and what alternative feminist ends and practices emerge in their writing?
Assignments for the course will include a short (3-4 page) paper, a longer (6-8 page) paper, a group research project, a take-home midterm, and a final exam. Regular attendance and participation in this discussion-based class is also a requirement.
The reading for the course will likely include Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood; Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek; Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy; Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters; Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose; Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy; and Octavia Butler, Kindred.