Postcolonial Englishes

Catalog description

Pidgins, creoles, patois and slang: there are so many Englishes! From Jamaica and Ireland, to America and India, from Spanglish and Hinglish to Londonstani slang and Black English, these languages have been wrought via complex colonial histories and shaped national languages and canon. This course is a broad exploration of writing produced in recent decades by Anglophone writers from the Americas, Africa and South Asia and the theoretical questions raised by such writing. The course will consider fiction and film that ranges from traditionally realist to formally experimentalist, short stories variously characterized as anti-colonial and Afro-pessimist, fiction by new writers and also by Nobel laureates, poetry about immigrant women and also the land-owning elite, and fiction that has been well-canonized as well as important writing that has been more or less forgotten. The course will consider questions of empire, postcoloniality, authenticity, voice and the role of vernacular languages in the writing we characterize as "Anglophone". Writers to be discussed include Langston Hughes, Salman Rushdie, Shani Mootoo, Arundhati Roy, Zadie Smith, June Jordan, Irvine Welsh, and Junot Diaz.