Topics in Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures (281-0-20)

Topic

Rivers and Ruins: Literature and Climate in the Po

Instructors

Govind Ponnuchamy

Meeting Info

University Hall 418: Tues, Thurs 12:30PM - 1:50PM

Overview of class

Rivers and Ruins: Literature and Climate in the Postcolonial World

This course explores how writers from the global South represent environmental crisis as lived experience rather than abstract data. Through fiction, essays, and films from South Asia, West Africa, and the Caribbean, we examine how literature offers insights into climate change, colonialism, and ecological harm—revealing how environmental damage is felt, remembered, and contested in everyday life. We begin with Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, set in the flood-prone Sundarbans of eastern India, where an American-Indian marine biologist searching for a rare river dolphin is rescued from crocodile-filled waters by a local fisherman and his unlikely companion, a businessman-turned-translator. As tides shift, cyclones threaten, and conservation laws collide with human survival, the novel asks whose lives and whose knowledge matter in a landscape shaped by water and state power. In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, we will explore how British colonialism transforms relationships to land, language, and the natural world of southeastern Nigeria, leaving cultural and ecological ruins. Finally, short works by Jamaica Kincaid expose how colonial histories remain embedded in Caribbean environments often imagined as "natural" or "paradisiacal." Students will come to understand nature as an active force in human history and literature as a record of the global inequity of climate change. Students will develop skills in close reading, discussion, and argumentation through short analytical writing assignments, an oral presentation, and a scaffolded research project.

Class Attributes

Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area
Global Perspectives on Power, Justice, and Equity

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Pre-registration -- Reserved for English students.