About

This blog is for students on the course EN695 Empire, New Nations and Migration, offering a series of new stories, videos and links to show how the themes and issue shave contemporary relevance.

This course introduces students to the field of postcolonial literature, focusing on the period from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The module will be divided into three consecutive areas: empire and colonisation (three weeks); liberation movements and the processes of decolonisation (either three or four weeks); and migration and diaspora (either three or four weeks). Centred primarily on canonical British colonial texts, the first part of the course may also involve comparison with other less familiar texts and contexts, such as those of Zionist nationalism and settler colonialism, or more popular twentieth-century imperial fantasy and adventure genres.

The texts in the second part of the module will be drawn primarily from Africa, the Carribean, the Middle East, and South Asia. The intention is to allow students to bring these disparate regions and texts into a productive dialogue with each other by reflecting on their shared history of decolonisation and their common engagement with colonial and liberation discourses.

The course further aims to sketch a narrative of empire and decolonisation that is in part relevant to contemporary postcolonial Britain, to which the final section on migration and diaspora then returns. Students will be introduced to key ideas from the work of (among others) Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall and Gayatri Spivak. Together with a broad primary textual arc stretching from the British empire to postcolonial Britain, the course will thus give students a cohesive intellectual narrative with which to explore changing conceptions of culture, history, and postcolonial identity across the modern world.

Texts include

• Karen Blixen (1937), Out of Africa, London: Penguin
• Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1967), A Grain of Wheat, London: Penguin
• Ayi Kwei Armah (1968), The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Oxford: Heinemann
• Edwidge Danticat (2004), The Dew-Breaker, New York: Alfred A. Knopf