The objectives: This course will help students acquire knowledge of postcolonial literatures in English. We will not only study the poems, short stories, novels, and essays of writers from former European colonies, but also sketch the history and cultures of these colonies in order to understand better the contexts of these postcolonial literatures. We will also consider writing from Canada as a settler colony and writing from the United States and its colonies where neocolonialism has influenced the production of literature. While the course aims to celebrate emergent literatures in English and the adaptation of English to various uses, we also want to problematize the relation between English and indigenous languages. We will consider how language itself has been and still is sometimes a tool of colonization that is internalized by the colonized. A new addition to this course is the preoccupation with speciesism in critical animal studies since it involves the assumption of human superiority leading to the exploitation of animals.
- Enseignant: Rimstead, Roxanne