Postcolonial Literature

Centered on how writers from former British colonies reckon with empire's aftermath, the course treats fiction less as cultural showcase and more as a site where questions of language, identity, and representation get fought out. You'll read Achebe, Coetzee, Hamid, Rushdie, Desai and others alongside theorists like Said, Fanon, Bhabha, and Spivak, working through close readings, two midterms, homework, and a final that asks you to bring history and theory to bear on the texts. As a senior elective it pulls together the literary history and critical theory you've built up across the program, giving the tools to read contemporary global anglophone writing on its own political terms.