How did colonialism shape the modern world? What are the ways in which colonial histories continue to inform our contemporary realities? How can we speak of the economic, cultural, and political subordination of the colonized peoples? These are some of the questions that inform postcolonial theory. This course engages with fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from the Global South to explore the theoretical language and resistant politics of postcolonial theory. We will read Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Aijaz Ahmed, Chinua Achebe, Jean Rhys, Homi Bhabha, Samanta Schweblin, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Arundhati Roy, Frantz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldua, JM Coetzee, Mohsin Hamid, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Vivek Chibber, AK Ramanujan, and Arjun Appadurai.
v.v.narayan@ashoka.edu.in