ENLT 339 Post/Colonial Lives Lit & Film

Arts & Letters Literature. Cultural Diversity. This course will focus on lived experiences of conflict, trauma, and resistance within colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial spaces-and the role of literary, cinematic, and cultural texts in bearing witness-in different parts of the world. We will examine key conversations and debates on colonization and decolonization; orientalism; globalization and neo-colonialism; race, gender, and class struggles; and generational trauma and memory across a wide variety of literary, visual, and oral genres/media. Selected course texts will include Aimé Cesaire's A Tempest (a postcolonial adaptation of Shakespeare's tragicomedy The Tempest); Toufic El Rassi's Arab in America (a comic book about the author's hyphenated identity and growing up experiences in pre- and post-9/11 U.S.); Basharat Peer's Curfewed Night (a memoir that chronicles conflict in Kashmir, one of the most militarized regions in the world); spoken word poems that challenge Orientalist stereotypes about non-Western women as exotic and/or oppressed; and critically acclaimed films, such as Maquilapolis and Trick or Treaty, which document Indigenous communities' experience of and resistance to globalization and settler colonialism. This course will include both analytical and reflective components that will foster critical thinking skills and encourage students to make self-reflexive connections between the multiple "worlds" that are depicted in the course texts and students' own locations and experiences.

Credits

3

Prerequisite

Take CORE-110 or HNR-150 or an OC, Oral Communication, course previously or concurrently.

Distribution

CD,LIT

Offered

Annual Fall Or Spring Semester