Universität Wien

142016 PS Decolonization and the South Asian English Novel (2020W)

5.00 ECTS (2.00 SWS), SPL 14 - Orientalistik, Afrikanistik, Indologie und Tibetologie
Continuous assessment of course work
Moodle

Registration/Deregistration

Note: The time of your registration within the registration period has no effect on the allocation of places (no first come, first served).

Details

max. 24 participants
Language: English

Lecturers

Classes (iCal) - next class is marked with N

UPDATE!
The course takes place digitally from Nov 5! Please visit Moodle to find the digital classroom in Jitsi.

  • Thursday 08.10. 13:45 - 15:15 Seminarraum 5 ISTB UniCampus Hof 4 2C-O1-34
  • Thursday 15.10. 13:45 - 15:15 Seminarraum 5 ISTB UniCampus Hof 4 2C-O1-34
  • Thursday 22.10. 13:45 - 15:15 Seminarraum 5 ISTB UniCampus Hof 4 2C-O1-34
  • Thursday 29.10. 13:45 - 15:15 Seminarraum 5 ISTB UniCampus Hof 4 2C-O1-34
  • Thursday 05.11. 13:45 - 15:15 Seminarraum 5 ISTB UniCampus Hof 4 2C-O1-34
  • Thursday 12.11. 13:45 - 15:15 Seminarraum 5 ISTB UniCampus Hof 4 2C-O1-34
  • Thursday 19.11. 13:45 - 15:15 Seminarraum 5 ISTB UniCampus Hof 4 2C-O1-34
  • Thursday 26.11. 13:45 - 15:15 Seminarraum 5 ISTB UniCampus Hof 4 2C-O1-34
  • Thursday 03.12. 13:45 - 15:15 Seminarraum 5 ISTB UniCampus Hof 4 2C-O1-34
  • Thursday 10.12. 13:45 - 15:15 Seminarraum 5 ISTB UniCampus Hof 4 2C-O1-34
  • Thursday 17.12. 13:45 - 15:15 Seminarraum 5 ISTB UniCampus Hof 4 2C-O1-34
  • Thursday 07.01. 13:45 - 15:15 Seminarraum 5 ISTB UniCampus Hof 4 2C-O1-34
  • Thursday 14.01. 13:45 - 15:15 Seminarraum 5 ISTB UniCampus Hof 4 2C-O1-34
  • Thursday 21.01. 13:45 - 15:15 Seminarraum 5 ISTB UniCampus Hof 4 2C-O1-34
  • Thursday 28.01. 13:45 - 15:15 Seminarraum 5 ISTB UniCampus Hof 4 2C-O1-34

Information

Aims, contents and method of the course

Superficially taken, resistance against the colonial cultural imperialism in a colonial language appears like a contradiction in term. But South Asian writers, right from Mulk Raj Anand to Rushdie and Mohsin Hamid, have been doing it as they have used the language of their colonial masters to subvert the colonial narratives and have thus written back to the Empire. Now South Asian English writings, especially Novel, have gained the status of a powerful parallel stream, if not a counter current. From portraying the imprints of damages done by the colonial rule on the life and mind of the South Asian people to their multiple types of resistance against the colonial yoke and the uneasy fusion of mindset and psyche of the colonizer and the colonized: ‘Chutnification of history’ (Rushdie) or The Third Space (Bhabha), new forms of colonialism/neo colonialism and the overall strategies of ‘decolonizing the mind’ from the indigenous people, there are many different stations of this journey. By studying select novels written both in the colonial period and in the post-Partition era as well as by the writers living in South Asia and those from the South Asia Diaspora, the course will explore various contours of decolonization.
Appropriating the word: the language question, politics of re-writing history, Nativism, representations of subalternity, cartographies and re-mapping/postcolonial spatialities, visualization and reversing the colonial gaze, postcolonial environments/ecocriticism and narrativizing decolonization/postcolonial narrative strategies, among others, will be discussed with readings of the texts from the select novels.
The course will help understand how a political struggle against the colonial rule and its remnants took shape and in which ways it has found its reflections in the imagination of South Asian writers writing in English.

Assessment and permitted materials

Minimum requirements and assessment criteria

Examination topics

Reading list

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
a: Theoretical Books
1. Britain and Decolonisation: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World by John Darwin
2. Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said
3. Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures. Edited by Juan G. Ramos & Tara Daly
4. Decolonising Heritage in South Asia: The Global, the National and the Transnational. Edited by Himanshu Prabha Ray
5. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature by wa Thiong’o Ngugi
6. Decolonization and the Decolonized by Albert Memmi
7. DecoIonization Agonistics in Postcolonial Fiction by Chidi Okonkwo
8. English Writing and India, 1600–1920 Colonizing Aesthetics by Pramod K. Nayar
9. Modern South Asian Literature in English by Paul Brians
10. Narratology and Ideology: Negotiating Context, Form, and Theory in Postcolonial Narratives. Edited by Divya Dwivedi, Henrik Skov Nielsen & Richard Walsh
11. Political Theories of Decolonization: Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations by Margaret Kohn and Keally McBride
12. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment by Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin
13. Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee
14. Postcolonial Studies and the Literary: Theory, Interpretation and the Novel
15. Postcolonial Theory: A critical introduction by Leela Gandhi
16. ‘Post’-9/11 South Asian Diasporic Fiction Uncanny Terror by Pei- chen Liao
17. Production of Postcolonial India and Pakistan: Meanings of Partition Interventions: by Ted Svensson
18. Remapping the Indian Postcolonial Canon: Remap, Reimagine and Retranslate by Nirmala Menon
19. South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations by Alex Tickell
20. South Asian Partition Fiction in English: From Khushwant Singh to Amitav Ghosh by Rituparna Roy
21. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English by C. L. Innes
22. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives by Macarena Gómez-Barris
23. The Location of Culture by Homi K. Bhabha.
24. The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
25. The Routledge Companion to Decolonization by Dietmar Rothermund
26. The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
27. Tropologies of Indianness in Anglophone Colonial and Postcolonial South Asian Fiction by Prasad Ramray Bidaye
28. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West by Robert Young
29. Writing Pakistan: Conversations on Identity, Nationhood and Fiction by Mushtaq Bilal
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b: Novels (A Tentative List):
1. Adib Khan: Seasonal Adjustments (Bangladesh)
2. Amitav Ghosh: The Glass Palace (India)
3. Anita Desai: Clear Light of Day (India)
4. Aravind Adiga: Amnesty (India)
5. Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things (India)
6. Bapsi Sidhwa: Ice-Candy Man by (Pakistan)
7. Kamila Shamsie: Kartography (Pakistan)
8. Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient (Sri Lanka)
9. Michelle de Kretser: Questions of Travel (Sri Lanka)
10. Mohsin Hamid: The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Pakistan)
11. Mulk Raj Anand. Untouchable (India)
12. R.K. Narayan. The Guide (India)
13. Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children (India)

Association in the course directory

BA10

Last modified: We 04.11.2020 11:48