COML 3892

Poetics of the People: Race, Caste and Postcolonial Comparison

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2015-2016 Catalog.

The class proposes an introduction to literary theory, with special focus on cultural, postcolonial, and subaltern studies. The comparative reflection will engage between English and French, starting with the work of Frantz Fanon and its foundational role in the formation of postcolonial studies in the 1980s. This bilingual line will take us to points of intersection between the "colonial question" and the "question noire," as we place anticolonial and postcolonial arguments in dialogue with pioneering works by Black essayists, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean Price-Mars, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon. Finally, tracing the ties between this Black Atlantic history of intellectual emancipation and B.R. Ambedkar's critique of caste in the context of India's anticolonial struggle will help form a differentiated understanding of the poetics of politics.

Distribution Category (CA-AS)

When Offered Spring.

Breadth Requirement (HB)

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