Courses

Approaches to literary studies often favor national, ethnic, and/or historical approaches. Postcolonial Studies expanded this approach by theorizing literature in relationship to histories of empire at a worldly, international scale. What would it mean to frame an approach to literature and the arts through the lens of militarism, especially in relationship to the environment? This class engages these questions by turning to literature and visual arts from Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific and South Asia to examine their histories of empire as well as how creative practitioners from these regions have engaged representations and experiences of militarism, ecology, and justice. The class will be taught in conjunction with Ecological Arts and Justice (DESMA 146) to examine how design and media arts have represented and contested military and particularly nuclear forces. Topics to explore include nuclearization as well as multi-scalar concerns from climate change to intimacies with more-than-human (especially oceanic) others. Reading materials will be interdisciplinary, comparative, and theoretical. Requirements include active class participation, weekly forum postings, attendance at coordinated lectures and field trips, and a final paper or a collaborative ecology and the arts poster project.

Most representations of nuclear weapon history focus on the American attacks on Japan, but during the subsequent five decades the U.S., France, and the U.K. detonated hundreds of nuclear weapons in the atolls and islands of the Pacific. The scale of atomic weapon detonations have often been described as “unrepresentable,” posing a particular challenge to literature and the arts in determining what narrative forms, genres, and modes of representation are adequate to representing these ongoing legacies of the Cold War. While nuclear detonations are often figured by their destructive ‘flash’ in history, many creative practitioners, activists, historians, and exposed communities have emphasized what Rob Nixon has termed the ‘slow violence’ of irradiation, which often has no temporal limits and is deeply embodied.

We will explore the work of Indigenous writers, filmmakers, and artists from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Samoa, Tahiti (French Polynesia), Hawai`i, and other areas of Oceania to engage how the violence of nuclear colonialism has been represented, contested, and embodied. Requirements include active class participation, weekly forum postings, a short presentation, and a final essay/project.

This course explores the postcolonial literary representation of what Richard Grove has called “green imperialism,” and Alfred Crosby has termed “ecological imperialism”---namely, the environmental impact of empire. By turning to poetry, film, and fiction from the Anglophone Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific Islands (including Aotearoa New Zealand), we will explore how contemporary writers inscribe the history of ecological imperialism, their representations of current environmental crises, and their models of postcolonial ecology and sustainability. Some topics to be explored include epistemologies of nature, land, and identity in the wake of colonial displacement, theorizing human/non-human relations, plantation monoculture, factory farming, nuclear militarism, climate change, biopiracy, and planetary.

Texts include JM Coetzee's The Lives of Animals, Indra Sinha Animal’s People, James George Ocean Roads, Cathie Koa Dunsford Pele’s Tsunami, Amitav Ghosh Calcutta Chromosome, Nalo Hopkinson Brown Girl in the Ring.

Postcolonialism is not a unified field of theoretical inquiry. This seminar, therefore, does not offer a linear narrative of the topic but takes instead an episodic approach that focuses on the works of some of the most prominent theoreticians for the field, including Franz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak. It provides a framework for thinking about the theoretical and political implications of using "postcolonialism" as an umbrella term to designate the ensemble of writings by those subjects whose identities and histories have been shaped by the colonial encounter. This class will be co-taught by Ali Behdad, Jenny Sharpe, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey and will cover topics such as the politics of representation; postcolonial feminisms; nationalism and national allegory; literary form (modernism, realism, postmodernism); and explore intersections between postcolonial and globalization studies. Authors include Said, Césaire, Fanon, Appadurai, Spivak, Wynter, and Glissant

What is the relationship between food, cultural identity, and representation? How is the culture of food represented by postcolonial writers? This course will examine a range of genres such as cookbooks, novels, poetry, and films to explore the complex relationship between representation, consumption, and the history of colonization (and globalization) in Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, and South Asia. Particular attention will be paid to the relationship between gender and food production and consumption, as well as to industrial food production in the U.S. and beyond. We will turn to texts from these regions to explore topics such as plantation and industrial agriculture, the body and consumption, food sovereignty, the politics of meat, the relationship to land, and animal rights.

Texts include Julia Alvarez, A Cafecito Story, Rosario Ferré, Sweet Diamond Dust, Austin Clarke, Pigtails ‘n Breadfruit, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions, Keri Hulme, Stonefish, Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats, J.M. Coetzee, Lives of Animals

The recognition of global climate change has catalyzed a new body of work in the visual arts, literature, and film. While the majority of US discourse about climate change has been focused on North American contexts, this course offers a global and comparative study of regions at the frontline of climate change, such as tropical islands and the poles, which are more visibly confronting sea-level rise and glacial melt. Turning to authors and artists from the US, Australia, Aotearoa, New Zealand, Guyana, Mexico, and the Maldives, this course will examine works of art and literature produced by and about communities at the forefront of environmental change, particularly island and indigenous peoples.

The course will begin with a discussion about the concept of “climate,” its intellectual history, and its disjunctive relationship to experiences of place signified by “weather.” We will then raise questions as to how a new era of environmental change may produce new narrative and artistic forms, such as the genre of “Cli-Fi,” defined as both “Climate Fiction” as well as “Climate Film.” Over the ten weeks, the course will examine how various narrative and visual modes—the novel, short story, documentary film, and art installations--engage different modes of storytelling about global environmental change such as apocalypse, slow violence, utopia, and dystopia. Addressing the threat of climate change and its complex cultural imaginations is an interdisciplinary endeavor. Therefore this course will draw from multiple disciplines such as literature, geography, history, anthropology, science, and film studies.

In an effort to call attention to planetary climate change, some geologists have named the ‘Anthropocene’ as a radical new geological epoch of environmental change akin to a meteor strike. They attribute the origins to the global rise of agriculture, nuclear radiation, and plastics. Yet scholars in the social sciences and humanities have pressed against this universal narrative to ask which humans are really making the impact? They point to histories of empire, militarism, and globalization as fundamental causes and raise questions as to how to tell the Anthropocene story (or stories) with attention to both local context and planetary scale. This interdisciplinary course explores the Anthropocene debate from the perspective of writers, artists, and filmmakers, particularly from islands in the global south. It turns to key concepts in the emergent field of Anthropocene studies such as climate, weather, scale, and species. The course will be particularly concerned with Postcolonial, Indigenous, Caribbean, and Pacific Island perspectives, especially the relationship between land and (rising) sea. Requirements include active class participation, weekly posts, a short presentation, and a final research paper/project.

This course traces out the recent oceanic turn in the humanities, with an emphasis on postcolonial methods and approaches. We will examine contemporary postcolonial literature (poetry, short stories, and the novel), visual arts, and films that represent the ocean as a space of migration, climate change, embodiment, fluidity, habitation, mining, and a place for an engagement with nonhuman others as well as alternative knowledge and ontologies. We will examine the relationship between empire and the oceans through postcolonial, feminist, and Indigenous methodologies, with a particular emphasis on texts from the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands. Requirements include active class participation, weekly forum postings, a short presentation/discussion starter, and a final essay/project.