"I am not trying to say that the novel - or the culture in the broad sense -
'causes' imperialism, but that the novel, as a cultural artefact of bourgeois
society, and imperialism are unthinkable without the other. ...
The novel is an incorporative, quasi-encyclopaedic cultural form."
(Edward Saïd, Culture and Imperialism 84)

This seminar engages with three kinds of texts: colonial novels which were enmeshed in the unfolding imperial process; postcolonial novels which critique and resist empire; and theoretical texts which engage with the relationships between writing and empire, resistance and writing, colonialism and postcolonialism. This distinction is not to suggest that these three kinds of textuality are completely separate from each other — instead, it is the overlap between them which is of interest, too.

Seminar participants are required to read the following three set texts during the term break and there’ll be a short reading test on them in April: 

1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
2. J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)
3. NN, TBC

We will also read excerpts from Shakespeare’s Tempest, E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924), Beryl Gilroy, Black Teacher (1976), Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest (1989), Saïd’s Culture & Imperalism (1993); Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (2000); Chimamanda Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Adania Shibli, Touch (2010).

Kurs im HIS-LSF