Department of Comparative Literature

Prof. Shaun Irlam 640 Clemens Mondays, 12:30-3:10 E:Mail: Shaun Irlam

Postcolonial theory, in its interrogations of subjectivity and the colonial Other, has increasingly turned to the "poetics" and praxis of territoriality that inaugurated imperial geographies, and the discursive processes involved in producing unevenly developed geopolitical spaces. In this course we will explore the spectralities of postcolonial space reflected in literary and cultural texts from post-apartheid South Africa. We will examine the way the coercive spatial organizations of segregation are received, imaged, and deciphered in postcolonial literatures and the vernacular spatial practices that issue from them.

Confected by a frenzy of segregationist legislation in the 1950s and 1960s, apartheid South Africa was and remains structured like a language. Apartheid produced a geography of segregation that seems integral to any inscription of imperial power. Derrida has commented recently on the "colonial structure of every culture" (Monolinguisme de l'autre). If this is the recognizable verso of his previous statement that South Africa, for most of the twentieth century the archetypal colonial society for the Western imagination, is the "concentration of world history" ("Racism's Last Word"), then South Africa becomes the unexampled example of the colony, the Rosetta Stone for a modern history construed as a history of colonialisms. Using South Africa as a "case-study," this course will focus on the bi-lateral production of postcolonial geography and postcolonial literature.

The South African novelist, J.M. Coetzee in 1987 remarked, "The deformed and stunted relations between human beings that were created under colonialism and exacerbated under ... apartheid have their psychic representation in a deformed and stunted inner life." He writes, "South African literature is a literature in bondage ... a less than fully human literature ... a world of pathological attachments." It will be our task to understand the meaning of the phrase "a literature in bondage." In other words, if the Xhosa epigram outlines a "local" theory of subjectivity, what happens in a culture where this formation of subjects was deliberately interrupted, and what kind of literature emerges under such conditions? Through an examination of selected South African texts we will develop various strategies for reading postcolonial literatures and explore post-structuralist, deconstructive, psychoanalytic Marxist and cultural materialist perspectives.

In particular we will read theorists such as Bhabha, Fanon, Mamdani, and Rose as well as Derrida's "Admiration de Nelson Mandela," and "Racism's Last Word". We will also read works by several southern African writers: Coetzee, Gordimer, Bessie Head, Antjie Krog, Malan, Etienne van Heerden, Marlene van Niekerk, Mia Couto, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Zakes Mda. Finally, we will be reading imperial geography, the poetics of segregationist space under apartheid, and the myriad ways this pathological geopolitics is projected in literary texts from South Africa.