English 9187A
Postcolonial Diasporas
Instructor: Professor N. Bhatia.
Fall Half Course.
From the migration of indentured workers to plantations in the Caribbean, travels to Africa, displacement and relocation of people because of the 1947 Partition of India, diasporic movements from the Indian subcontinent have been entangled in global colonial histories. With attention to race, class and gender, and the ways in which they inform the politics of dislocation/relocation, this course will examine literary and cultural representations of what Vijay Mishra calls the “diasporic imaginary.” Along with key theoretical writings by Vijay Mishra, Avtar Brah, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, we will read literary texts by Rushdie, Vassanji, Kureishi, Sidhwa, Naipaul and Badami in order to examine historically contextualized understandings of ongoing debates about borders, home, community, nation, exile and diaspora.
