91Ö±²¥

This module explores 20th- and 21st-century postcolonial and world literature through a wide range of forms, regions, and traditions. You will be encouraged to think about mobility as a central concept: how do texts travel? What happens when texts move across borders, languages, and cultures? How do texts circulate, and how do adaptation and translation shape interpretation across cultural contexts?

We will focus on work in global settings including formerly colonised regions, considering how writers ‘write back’ or write otherwise to dominant literary forms. We examine movement as spatial, temporal, and psychic, and explore how literary mobility is shaped by cultural specificity, histories of conflict and the legacies of settler colonialism. You will engage with postcolonial and world-systems theory, alongside concepts such as hybridity, neocolonialism, land and dispossession, developing tools to situate your reading within broader transnational conversations.

Throughout the module, you will have the opportunity to develop close-reading and analytical skills by working with texts that diverge from Eurocentric perspectives, drawing from an understanding of world literature as expanding, incomplete, and open to the future. 
 

This unit allows students to:

- discuss a work of literature in relation to the social, cultural, and transnational formations shaping the context of literary production.

- developing skills in oral and written communication.

- exercise independent study, project development and academic skills (research, analysis, argumentation) in assessment tasks.

- work across cultural media to understand the interpretative implications of form and genre, enhancing interdisciplinary, cross-cultural thinking.

- improve critical and political literacy through engagement with literary and theoretical debates on postcolonialism, mobility, and the legacies of imperialism, including attention to inequality, representation, and struggles over autonomy and self-determination, developing analytical reasoning applicable across diverse professional contexts.
 

This course will be taught via 2-hour lectures and 1-hour weekly seminars

Distinguish between a range of 20th- and 21st-century postcolonial and world literatures by analysing texts from diverse regions, forms, and literary traditions.

Apply a critical understanding of how literature emerging beyond Eurocentric frameworks reflect, shape, and respond to global mobilities and histories of colonialism and displacement.

Identify the ways texts travel through, forms of circulation, adaption, reflecting on how meaning is responsive to context. 

Apply critical and theoretical concepts relevant to postcolonial and world literature to interpret the political and socio-cultural questions posed by a range of texts.

Construct coherent written and oral arguments that analyse texts in relation to broader transnational literary conversations. 

Practice skills of close reading and critical analysis through engagement with postcolonial and global texts, theory and criticism.

Make good use of library, electronic, and online resources pertaining to the course.

Make clear and persuasive written and oral arguments, with attention to the relevant audience. 

Retrieve, sift, organist, synthesise and critically evaluate material from a range of different sources, including library, electronic, and online resources.

Illustrate the ability to improve one’s own learning through independent study and effective time management.

Contribute to the collective learning of the group through participation in inclusive seminar activities, making contributions appropriate to individual learning needs and access requirements.

Develop a reflective and sensitive attitude towards cultural difference. 

Primary texts:

Abani, Chris, Graceland (2004)

Al Aswany, Alaa, The Yacoubian Building (2007)  

Allende, Isabelle, ‘Two Words’ (1989)

Dangarembga, Tsitsi, Nervous Conditions (1988)

Danticat, Edwidge, Krik? Krak! (1995)  

Grace, Patricia, Potiki (1986)

Kang, Han, The Vegetarian (2007)

Miller, Kei, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (2014)

Soyinka, Wole, Death and the King’s Horseman (1975)

Roy, Arundhati, The God of Small Things (1997)

Rhys, Jean, The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)  

Persepolis, dir. By Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud (Sony Picture Classics, 2007)

Secondary texts:

Achebe, Chinua, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness’, (1977)

Anzaldúa, Gloria, Borderlands = La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)

Ashcroft, Bill, with Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (2002)

Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism (1950)

Boehmer, Elleke, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (2005)

Etherington, Ben, and Jarad Zimbler, The Cambridge Companion to World Literature (2018)

Vizenor, Gerald, Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (2008)

Nkrumah, Kwame, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965)  

Wallerstein, Immanuel, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (2007).