Problems in Literary Study: Postcolonial Heterotopias

This course is an invitation to rethink established accounts of postcolonial literature outside national allegory, modern subjectivity, and the symbolic. Focusing on "non-places" and "minor" characters, the course seeks to understand the postcolonial imaginary beyond the utopia of community and the dystopia of postmodern angst and to explore selves and non-selves formed in deterritorialized zones, degraded ecologies, and spaces of exclusion. The course focuses on disposable subjects, bare life, and with experiences locked in a range of heterotopias--middle passages, islands, deserts, penal colonies, and spaces of death.