Topics in Literary Theory (493-0-20)
Topic
Postcolonial/Decolonial Thought in the Francophon
Instructors
Doris Garraway
847/491-8255
1860 S. Campus Drive, Crowe Hall #2-134
Meeting Info
Kresge Centennial Hall 4-410: Wed 5:00PM - 7:50PM
Overview of class
This course introduces students to a diverse field of French-language intellectual production concerned with analyzing, contesting, and transforming colonial relations of power and knowledge. French-language authors have produced some of the most radical critiques of French and European imperial projects in the modern era while innovating within related fields such as critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, discourse analysis, literary theory, and philosophy. Yet, their reception in the Anglophone academy has often been marked by decontextualized or selective readings. Our priority will be to foreground the specificity of the French-language decolonial tradition as a response to a particular brand of colonialism rooted in a universalizing, humanist project, as well as to particular local manifestations and effects of this project. Ranging across four main sites of theoretical production, including revolutionary Haiti, the mid-20th-century French Caribbean, Paris, and Sub-Saharan Africa, our readings will highlight the ways in which French-language thinkers from Jean-Jacques Dessalines to Achille Mbembe have forged a distinctly non-essentialist theoretical tradition by working within and against intellectual currents of Enlightenment universalism, existentialism, historical materialism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and post-structuralism. At the same time, through critical analysis and secondary readings, we will evaluate the continued relevance of these thinkers' attempts to conceptualize problems of intellectual and psychic (dis)alienation, postcolonial sovereignty, cultural hybridity, emancipatory artistic creation, and freedom for intellectual projects in the humanities and social sciences today. Main texts by authors such as Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Aimé Césaire, Jane Nardal, Paulette Nardal, Suzanne Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, V.Y. Mudimbe, and Achille Mbembe, with relevant secondary readings as needed. Taught in English, with texts available in both French and English.
Class Materials (Required)
TBA