Encountering the Other

Catalog description

The question of the 'Other' is one of the most intractable social, philosophical and political questions of contemporary existence. The ‘Other’ can take multiple forms: ethnic, racial, sexual, national, class and the list is potentially endless. We encounter otherness on a daily basis and given the highly mobile world we inhabit Otherness also often becomes a source of conflict. This course asks a set of interrelated questions about how we encounter otherness from a specifically postcolonial lens – particularly in terms of how otherness is represented. Some of the questions it raises are: What was the nature of Otherness in the colonial encounter and what are its postcolonial implications? What are the politics of attempting to comprehend the Other? Is the Other constructed or is it real? Why has Otherness been important for a sense of self, particularly in colonial discourses? But also how does such notions of Otherness continue to shape identities in the postcolonial world and the Global South? How are academic disciplines and epistemologies implicated in producing the Other? The course takes as it point of departure anglophone writing from different historical and geographical contexts to critically explore how writers using English as their primary medium of expression have grappled with representing 'otherness'. We will read texts such as Leonard Woolf's Village in the Jungle set in colonial Sri Lanka, George Orwell's Burmese Days set in colonial Burma (or what is now Myanmar) and Paul Theroux's Kowloon Tong set in Hong Kong to respond to a set of questions that arise when Otherness is produced under contexts of extreme inequality, such as colonialism.