Postcolonial/Global/World
Johns Hopkins University, Spring 2027
Office Hours by Appt in Gilman 30A
As any English job-market candidate knows, the past decade or so has seen a confusing
proliferation of terms to describe the study of non-Western literatures. “Postcolonial” – long
the label of choice for Anglo-American work on the now-independent literary cultures of the
former British empire – has steadily given way to an uncertain mix of “global,”
“transnational,” and “world” field designations. Practically speaking, these terms refer to
roughly the same body of scholarship and critics. Paradigmatically speaking, they point
toward a series of fault lines in the discipline’s re-constitution from the 1980s onward to
accord with a more reflexive globality. What is the ideal balance, in training American
scholars to work beyond Europe and the U.S., between the in-depth study of national or
regional traditions and a broad theoretical purview? What are the strengths and limitations of
an English department in addressing multilingual geographies and influences? How do we
square a characteristic postcolonial investment in social activism with more specifically
“literary” modes of inquiry? Can we, finally, speak of a “global” field at all, or are we living
through a necessary scaling back in the geographical scope of our methodological ambitions?
This seminar charts the relationship among postcolonial theory, comparative literature, and
various trans-European constellations emanating from English departments from the late
1970s through today. We begin with the movement often shorthanded as “discursive
postcolonialism,” and work through its self-critique (from both theoretical and materialist
angles), as well as some of its outstanding regionally specific applications. After a brief
detour through the multiculturalist debates of the 1990s, we arrive at this century’s
disjuncture in literary studies between a capacious world systems theory, on the one hand,
and a turn to particularity, local aesthetics, and untranslatability on the other. Finally, we
examine recent work by scholars who aim to reconcile “global literature” as a whole with
knowledge of how particular traditions often marked here as “global” have evolved.
To help ground our critical discussions, we will bookend the course with two novels at either
end of the postcolonial spectrum, one celebrated as generically quintessential, and one
independently published to be genre-defying: V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967) and Mark
de Silva’s Square Wave (2016). Each seminar member’s objective is to articulate a cogent,
individual stance on how to negotiate between an ambitious disciplinary whole and its now-
fractious range of assumed parts, while arriving at a clear sense of field periodicity.
Requirements
• Individual 20-30 minute “conference” presentation during the final course unit, on a
contemporary critical work of your choosing from the list provided.
• Sample field course syllabus (level to be determined).
• Article-length (20 – 25 pp) final paper developed in consultation with professor, to
be workshopped in class mini-conference.
• Weekly attendance and participation with no exceptions, barring approved absences.
Week 1 – January 30th – Postructuralism/Postcolonialism
-Franz Fanon, speech before the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris in
September 1956, plus “The Negro and Language” from Black Skin, White Masks
-Homi K. Bhabha, forward to 1986 edition of Black Skin, White Masks, plus “Of Mimicry
and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”
-Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
-Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Week 2 – February 6th – Introduction to Edward Said
-Introduction to Orientalism
-From Culture and Imperialism: essays IV and V, “Discrepant Experiences” and “Connecting
Empire to Secular Interpretation”
-From The World, the Text, and the Critic: essays 9 and 10, “Criticism Between Culture and
System” and “Traveling Theory”
Week 3 – February 13th – The Materialist Retort
-Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”
-Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial, Introduction and Section 1 (pgs 1 – 66).
-Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, Chapters 2 and 5, “Fredric Jameson ‘Third World
Literature’: A Defence” and “The Battle over Edward Said.”
Week 4 – February 20th – Case Study in The “Classic” Postcolonial Novel
-V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men
-Ian Baucom, Chapter 5, “Among the Ruins: Topographies of Postimperial Melancholy”
from Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity
*Suggested reading: Imraan Coovadia, Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul
Week 5 – February 27th – Postcolonial Theory as Regional Literary Practice
(Special guest seminar with Sangeeta Ray, University of Maryland)
-Sangeeta Ray, En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives
-Olakunle George, Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters
*Suggested reading:
Ania Loomba, ed., Post-colonial Shakespeares
David Attwell, Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History
Week 6 – March 6th – Liberalism in Crisis: 90s Multiculturalist Debates
-Homi K. Bhabha, “Liberalism’s Sacred Cow” from The Boston Review
-John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation Part I, “Canonical and
Noncanonical: The Current Debate,” with whole book suggested
Week 7 – March 13th – Black Atlantic Studies
-Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness chapters 1, 2, and 6
-Edward Glissant, sections “Poetics” and “An Exploded Discourse” from Caribbean Discourse
-Lisa Lowe, selections tbd from The Intimacies of Four Continents.
-SPRING BREAK-
Week 8 – March 27th – World Systems Theory
-Immanuel Wallerstein, selections as provided from World Systems Analysis: An Introduction
-Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-
Literature
Week 9 – April 3rd – Singular vs Multiple Modernities
-Bill Ashcroft, “Alternative Modernities: Globalization and the Post-Colonial”
-Susan Stanford Friedman, “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the
Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies”
-Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question, Part II
Week 10 – April 10th – The Resurgence of “World Literature”
-Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature”
-Pascale Casanova, “Literature as a World”
-Emily Apter, “Against World Literature”
(Above three texts provided from World Literature in Theory anthology)
-Alex Beecroft, “World Literature Without a Hyphen”
Week 11 – April 17th – In Tension: Globality, Region, Comparison
-Isabel Hofmeyr, “The Complicating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method”
-Gayatri Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, sections 11, 12, 22, and 23
(on translation and world vs comparative literature, respectively).
-Natalie Melas, “Merely Comparative,” (All the Difference in the World recommended)
-Aamir R. Mufti, selection tbd from Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures
Week 12 – April 24th – Case Study in the New Global Novel
-Mark de Silva, Square Wave
(Also read my review essay on the novel in n+1, which I will link to by email)
Week 13 – May 1st – Presentations on Recent Work in the World/Global Field
Possible Titles:
Michael Allan, In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt
Jing Tsu, Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora
Omar Hena, Global Anglophone Poetry: Literary Form and Social Critique [ … ]
Anjali Nerlekar, Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture
Akin Adesokan, Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics
Mariano Siskind, Cosmopolitan Desires
Maria Lauret, Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature
Lorna Burns, Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze: Literature Between Postcolonialism and
Post-Continental Philosophy
