Description
How can we think about a world today that exists within the long shadows of histories of colonial extraction, violence, and racism? How does history shape the languages and categories through which we feel, speak, think, and act? What is the nature of power, and what happens to power when the one who exercises it to dominate others disappears from direct view? What does it mean to be free, or to decolonize a world or a mind? These are the kinds of questions out of which 'postcolonial theory' developed. In this writing-intensive seminar, we will begin with foundational texts from Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha. We will then draw out the resonances of these writers through anti-colonial, Black radical, Afropessimist, feminist, and Marxist traditions that challenge and extend postcolonial theory's interventions into our concepts of 'theory' and political struggle. In the process, as a group working together in a studio writing class, we will interweave discussion with writing exercises oriented around conceptual problems at the center of postcolonial theory, including the power of writing itself. From various freewriting exercises to formal essays that will go through multiple processes of revision, we will practice several different writing styles in order to consider the various meanings of freedom, domination, and the possibilities of subversion as a guiding principle for writing itself. FYS II develops college-level writing skills, prepares one for upper level Liberal Arts courses, and allows one to improve expressing their ideas in writing.
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Class Number
1335
Credits
3
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