Studies in Postcolonial Literature (365-0-20)
Topic
Ecologies of Resistance
Instructors
Evan Mwangi
Meeting Info
Harris Hall L06: Mon, Wed 12:30PM - 1:50PM
Overview of class
This course explores how postcolonial writers engage the environment not as passive backdrop but as a contested site of struggle, survival, and resistance. Students examine how colonialism and global capitalism have reshaped relationships to land, water, animals, and climate, and how literature responds to environmental violence, dispossession, and ecological crisis while imagining alternative modes of care, belonging, and sustainability.
In addition to novels and memoir, the course features brief poetry interludes, engaging short works by writers such as Niyi Osundare, Kofi Awoonor, Gcina Mhlophe, and Benjamin Zephaniah, among others, foregrounding poetry as a vital form of ecological critique, protest, and cultural memory. Literary texts are paired with accessible theoretical readings in postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental humanities by thinkers such as Rob Nixon (slow violence, environmental injustice), Homi Bhabha (hybridity, colonial ambivalence), Robert J. C. Young (colonialism, decolonization, resistance), Cajetan Iheka (African ecologies, resistance aesthetics), and Elizabeth DeLoughrey (islands, oceanic ecologies, empire), alongside other scholars at the intersection of postcolonialism, ecology, and resistance. The course emphasizes close reading, historical context, and comparative analysis.
Teaching Method
Interactive lectures, guided discussion, close reading workshops, small group activities, short contextual presentations, comparative analysis across genres, and occasional low stakes reflective or creative exercises. Emphasis is placed on discussion based learning and sustained engagement with primary texts.
Evaluation Method
Short response papers or reading reflections, one midterm analytical essay, one final essay or project; participation, including discussion and in class writing.
Class Materials (Required)
Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide. Publisher: Mariner Books. ISBN 13: 978 0618869843
Indra Sinha - Animal's People. Publisher: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 13: 978 1416523325
Jamaica Kincaid - A Small Place. Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 13: 978 0374527071
Ken Saro Wiwa - A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary. Publisher: Penguin Books. ISBN 13: 978 0140255379
Linda Hogan - Solar Storms. Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 13: 978 0393343687
Nnedi Okorafor - Lagoon. Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks. ISBN 13: 978 0062299039
Poetry Packet (Canvas)
Selected poems by Niyi Osundare, David Rubadiri, Kofi Awoonor, Benjamin Zephaniah, and women poets such as Gcina Mhlophe (orality, land, communal memory), Kristina Rungano (land, political struggle), Grace Nichols (Caribbean ecologies, embodiment), Warsan Shire (displacement, environmental precarity), and Safia Elhillo (diaspora, memory, landscape), among others, engaging environmental crisis and resistance through diverse poetic forms.
Class Attributes
Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Global Perspectives on Power, Justice, and Equity
SoC Humanities and Fine Arts Distro