Courses

This course will examine some of the major debates, contested genealogies, epistemic and political interventions, and possible futures of the body of writing that has come to be known as postcolonial theory, in relation to histories and practices of decolonization. The course title, “Freedom Times,” is adapted from Gary Wilder’s Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (2015); the plural, freedom times, gestures toward our consideration of multiple and successive moments in which liberation from colonial or imperial rule has been imagined and fought for. What did the mid-20th century theorists of Negritude whom Wilder analyzes mean by “decolonization,” and how do those aspirations differ from those working for “decolonization” around the world today? How do these different struggles draw from – or talk past or even repudiate – one another? How do they imagine the relationship between politics and aesthetics, or (following Frantz Fanon) national liberation and national culture? Or think beyond the nation?

We’ll discuss foundational texts associated with multiple European empires (French, as well as British and Portuguese), with some particular attention to Paris as a site of postcoloniality. One goal of the course will be to develop a historical understanding of key debates and longstanding concerns in postcolonial studies that will help us to contextualize contemporary discussions in France about colonial/imperial history, postcolonial citizenship, and the ongoing transformation of cultural institutions and civic life. Our syllabus will be a mix of literary and theoretical texts, and at least two films (The Battle of Algiers and Bamako). We’ll consider what counts as “theory” in postcolonial theory: in what ways have novels, memoirs, films, or revolutionary manifestos, for example, offered seminal, generalizable statements about the colonial and postcolonial condition?