ENG402 Europe and its Former Colonies

Spring 2013

Meeting Times: Tuesday and Fridays, 13.30-15.00

Location: E003

Instructor: Dr. Sandra Zito

Email: szito@uci.edu

Office Phone: 2117

Office Hours: Tuesdays: 11.00-12.00, or by appointment

Course Description: This course will explore the literary and cultural aspects of European colonialism, post-colonialism, and the impact this has had on the global exchange of peoples, languages, and cultures. A diversity of texts will be studied from the early modern to the contemporary periods providing a diversity of perspectives of how Europe sees and is seen by the rest of the world. There will be a critical inquiry of the effects of Europe’s cross-cultural interaction with Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and how this has shaped, challenged and transformed notions of self, citizenry, spirituality, aesthetics. Topics to be studied may include early European travel literature and ethnography, contemporary European migrant literature, the discursive formation of Orientalism, the interface of modernity and colonialism, and of postmodernity and postcoloniality, processes of creolization in language and culture.

This particular class will focus on European colonial discourses and the cultural responses to them from the late nineteenth century to the present. European colonial discourses will be analyzed through political writings, the relationship between modernism and primitivism, and the circulation of high and popular cultural products between the colonies and the metropolitan centers from the late nineteenth century until decolonization. Responses and resistance to the culture of European imperialism(s) will be explored through anti-colonial discourses from Africa and the Caribbean, and will continue with an investigation of the lingering effects of European colonial discourses on contemporary cultural and political realities today.

Student Learning Objectives:

By the end of class students should be able to:

· Analyze European colonial discourses in high and popular cultural products from the late 19^th century to the present (e.g., literature, film, commodities, advertisements, artwork, ethnographic objects, etc.)

· Describe how European colonialists dehumanized colonized subjects through representations in high and popular culture and how these images persist today

· Explain how anti-colonial intellectuals, artists, and authors used culture and language to resist racism and colonial power

· Synthesize the debates on postcolonial theory and colonial discourse that have emerged since the end of formal colonization

Required Texts:

Course Reader, available at PC Copy Shop

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness

Course Assignments:

Group Work/

Class Participation 30%

Midterm Exam 20%

5-7 page Paper 20%

Final Exam 30%

Course Expectations and Requirements: This class will be a combination of short lectures, small group work, and class discussion. Small group work and class discussion will revolve around the assigned reading for the day, so please bring the reading with you to each class and be prepared to discuss it. The mid-term and final exam will draw from the readings and lectures and will be composed of defining keywords/concepts and answering several short essay questions. The longer expository essay is a chance for you to synthesize and apply some of the main concepts and debates we discuss in class through an interpretation of a cultural product of your own choosing.

***Syllabus Subject to Change***

Weekly Schedule:

Week 1: Introduction: Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory

January 22: Introduction

Readings:

January 25: Said, Edward. Introduction and “Empire, Geography, Culture” in Culture and Imperialism (1995), xi-14.

Module I: Colonial Discourses

Week 2: Political and High Literary Discourses

Readings:

January 29: Rhodes, Cecil. “Confession of Faith” (1877)

February 1: Kipling, Rudyard. “The White Man’s Burden” (1889)

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness, 1-25

Week 3: Ethnographic Discourses, Exhibitions and Constructing the Colonial Gaze

Feb 5: Qureshi, Sadiah. “Displaying Sara Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’,” History of Science, vol. 42: June 2004, 233-257.

February 8: Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness, 26-51

Week 4: Primitivism/Modernism

Readings:

February 12: Torgovnick, Marianna. “Defining the Primitive/Reimagining Modernity” in Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Primitive Lives (1991), 3-42.

February 15: Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness, 52-77

Week 5: Commercial Advertising and Popular Literature

Readings:

February 19: McClintock, Anne. “Soft-Soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising” in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995), 207-231.

February 22: Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness, 77-end

Film: King Solomon’s Mines

Module II: Anti-colonial Discourses

Week 6: Theorizing Colonized Cultures and Anti-Colonial Resistance: Negritude

February 26: Midterm

Readings:

March 1: Poems from the Negritude movement

Senghor, Léopold. “Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century” (1966) in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (1994), 27-35.

Week 7: Theorizing Colonized Cultures and Anti-Colonial Resistance: National Cultures

Readings:

March 5: Fanon, Frantz. “On National Culture” excerpted from The Wretched of the Earth (1963) in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (1994), 36-52.

March 8: Cabral, Amilcar. “National Liberation and Culture” in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (1994), 53-65.

Film: Battle of Algiers

Week 8: Language, Subjectivity, and Resisting the Colonial Gaze

Readings:

March 12: Fanon, Frantz. Introduction and “The Negro and Language” in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), 1-40.

March 15: Fanon, Frantz. “The Fact of Blackness” in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), 109-140.

Week 9: Language and the Politics of Culture

March 19: Achebe, Chinua. “The African Writer and The English Language” (1975) excerpt in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (1994), 428-434.

March 22: Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. “The Language of African Literature” (1986) excerpt in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (1994), 435-455.

Module III: Postcolonial Discourses

Week 10: Knowledge/Power

Readings:

March 26: Said, Edward. “Introduction” in Orientalism (1978), 1-28.

March 29: Said, Edward. “Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental” in Orientalism (1978), 49-73.

Week 11: Diaspora I: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Identity

Readings:

April 2: Rushdie, Salman. “Imaginary Homelands” and “The New Empire Within Britain” in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (1991), 9-21; 129-138.

April 5: Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” excerpt from Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (1994), 392-403.

Film: Gurinder Chadha’s “I’m British But…”

Week 12: Diaspora II: Race, Nation and the Politics of Culture

Readings:

April 9: Gilroy, Paul. “The Black Atlantic as Counterculture of Modernity” in Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), 1-40.

April 12: Writing Workshop

Week 13: Globalization and Culture

Readings:

April 16: Appadurai, Arjun. “Here and Now” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), 1-23.

April 19: Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), 27-47.

Paper Due

Film: Life and Debt

Exam Prep: April 22-26

Easter Vacation: April 29-May 12

Final Exam: TBA