Postcolonial poetics: 21st-century critical readings (original) (raw)
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The Rise of the Unsaid: Spaces in Teaching Postcolonial Literature.
Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice (Routledge), 2015
Teaching postcolonial literature can be a daunting undertaking that teachers may try to avoid. This article explores three problems that teachers may confront in teaching postcolonial texts. The first problem deals with which literary text to choose and the criteria that may help teachers anchor their choices. Second, in response to the question of how teachers pedagogically assist students to correct preconceived notions and deconstruct stereotypes, this article proposes three stages of creating and recreating spaces that interact and ultimately assist students generate meaning. Students move from prior knowledge into an informed reality guided by the teacher and then into the world of the text in a process that involves collaborative learning, reinventing conceptual realities and the concretization of literary texts. Third, I examine how to approach postcolonial texts by utilizing Iser's aesthetic act of reading. The work posits a teaching model of three phases that help students interact and eventually unlock assumed unfamiliarity with postcolonial texts.
Postcolonial Studies, 2021
The article confronts postcolonial criticism with postcritique, a proposal by Rita Felski for a hermeneutic strategy aiming to overcome the limits of critique. Because of its self-reflexivity, its liaison with poststructuralism, and the societal categories it mobilizes, postcritics often see postcolonial criticism as a quintessential example of critique. However, postcolonial authors share similar concerns as postcritics, particularly when warning against any hasty conflation between intellectual work and political commitment. This article argues that the postcritical understanding of critique eschews the connection between critique and the realm of culture, thereby running the risk of doing away with context altogether. In order to account for the frameworks or contexts in which cultural objects are produced, without falling into some of the pitfalls of critique that postcritique aims to counter, the article proposes to look at the figure of the author as a bridge between the individual and the collective, as Edward Said suggests. The article closes with an analysis of several (critical and postcritical) readings of J. M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus to provide an example of how authorship can enter the interpretive scene through the figure of 'late style'.
World Literature, Critical Approaches: Reading Postcolonial Environments
Course Syllabus, 2023
Course Description: In this course, we will travel through historical moments guided by the stories that map our worlds and our political imaginations. We will seek to unsettle conventional categories of “world” as we carefully reorient ourselves in relation to the texts under study—novels, stories, and poems that demand a rearticulation of the so-called “archetype.” As we travel across continents, guided by Imbolo Mbue or Helena María Viramontes, we will consider the trajectories of power that they map and the aesthetic forms that are neither universal nor derivative, but persistently and indignantly local—that is, materially and historically situated. We will begin with a consideration of the political stakes of “worlding” literature before embarking on a three-pronged journey: texts that map empire; stories that illuminate the sacrifice zones of our contemporary petrosphere; and narratives that demand a consideration of the role of energy in the construction, dissemination, and interpretation of aesthetic form. Required texts: Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, ISBN-13: 978-1583670255 Patrick Chamoiseau, Slave Old Man, ISBN-13: 978-1-62097-588-6 Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, ISBN-13: 978-0312428594 Shailja Patel, Migritude, ISBN-13: 978-1885030054 Helena María Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus ISBN-13: 978-0452273870 *All readings appended with an asterisk (*) will be made available on Canvas.
Aesthetic Criticism and the Postcolonial
The Question of the Aesthetic, 2022
This chapter examines the fraught relationship between the discourse of aesthetics and postcolonial discourse. In the process, it redefines the meaning of “aesthetics” as it applies to the sense, sensibility, and “dissensus” (Rancière’s term) of postcolonial literature and theory. The chapter argues that this is crucial to reclaim postcolonial studies as either a Bloom-ian school of resentment or what Felski and Anker disparagingly call the “ethos of critique.” The chapter dwells also on what “postcolonial” might mean in this aesthetic reckoning, which acknowledges its political contexts and imperatives without arresting the play and performativity of the literary.