ENG 360-01 - Seminar in Postcolonial Literature

4 credits (Spring)

Democracy in Crisis?: Postcolonial Solidarities in a Post Cold War World. In the decades after World War II, anticolonial nationalist movements across the Global South led to the dissolution of Britain’s Empire. As the United States and the Soviet Union supplanted Britain as major world superpowers, both became locked in the Cold War competition to influence newly sovereign nations to support capitalist democracy or communism respectively. This seminar explores literary and media productions from India, Yugoslavia, Egypt, and Cuba that spoke out against cultural imperialism, nuclear armament, and human rights abuses inflicted by both superpowers. We will consider aesthetics of resistance in the form of magical realism, graphic novels, experimental radio, and avant-garde film. Understanding these histories offers insights into how we might confront the current resurgence of the right, threats to democratic freedoms, and xenophobia aimed at migrants in crisis.

Prerequisite: ENG 224, ENG 225, ENG 226, or ENG 229.
Instructor: Sutaria

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