Poetry and the Politics of Decolonization

Catalog description

The course looks at poets writing in the twentieth century and after whose work is concerned with liberation from colonial rule and, subsequently, with the formation of a post-colonial literary voice. Poetry in the period of decolonization deals with issues of nationalism, racism, and gender identity, place and displacement, and freedom from linguistic and political oppression. We will read, among others, poets from the Indian Subcontinent and Middle East such as Tagore, Iqbal, Faiz and Darwish; two leading poets of négritude, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, in relation to movements in Caribbean, African, and American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present (Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Nicolas Nicolas Guillén, and Derek Walcott); "Latin American poets including Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz; and English-language poets including W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, and voices of "more contemporary movements in poetry including the Beat, feminist, indigenous, LGBTQ and "Black Lives Matter" movements. Using theory and historical background, we will look at the work of each poet comparatively in the context of international development and political change. The course offers an approach to a voice not simply of protest, but of political identity through literature; since this process has touched so much of the world, we are open to works from other literatures that students propose.