ENGL326

Students in this course will examine literature from various geographic locations comprising a particular cultures (South Asian or Latin) dispersal of people, language, and culture-and study how various contexts influence and shape cultural production and representations of identity. Within these myriad sites, we will investigate the double consciousness necessary to maintain a sense of self outside ones place of cultural origin, and the impact of colonization on definitions of home. Our primary focus will be textual analysis, including questions of genre, language, narration and perspective. We will also study the sociopolitical and cultural conflicts and causes for emigration that provide the fictions contexts (in the case of South Asian diaspora: caste and religious divisions; Indias partition; civil war in Sri Lanka; tensions within England, North America, and the Caribbean), and discuss how national divisions play out in the microcosm of each text. Discussions and readings of primary literature will be aided by (post) colonial discourse and contemporary multimedia.