Department of Comparative Literature
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Course Outline |
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| "It took dominion everywhere...." | |||||||||||||||
| Postcolonial theory, in its interrogations of subjectivity, has tended to overlook the "poetics" and praxes of territoriality as well as the political, economic and discursive processes involved in producing, organizing and distributing unevenly developed geopolitical spaces. It is necessary to ask how these coercive spatial organizations are received, imaged, and deciphered from postcolonial perspectives, and what vernacular spatial practices issue from them. The title of this course deliberately echoes Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies to ask how we should think postcoloniality and space together. | |
 | When Soja suggests that "it may be space more than time that hides consequence from us," he posits human geographies as sequences of encryption yielding textual practices that invites reading. The "postcolonial" geography is structured like a language. In this seminar we shall read several theorists of space alongside literary representations of postcolonial geography, to disclose such spaces in Sembène's Sénégal or Mike Davis's Los Angeles. |
| We shall take Fredric Jameson's now famous essay, "Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism" as a point of departure. This course will be an investigation of current theories regarding the production of space and the different inflections of space determined by such signifiers as race, gender, class, postmodernity, and late capitalism. |  |
| I wish to examine the production of colonial and postcolonial geographies and the concept of social space as a commodity as theorized by Mary Douglas, Frantz Fanon, Gaston Bachelard, Henri Lefebvre, Derek Gregory, Anthony King, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Fredric Jameson, Mike Davis, Ackbar Abbas and Benedict Anderson. We shall also read some influential works of "postcolonial" literature (novels and film) in order to examine ways in which postcolonial geographies and social spaces are materialized in these media. | |
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