English 9187
Postcolonial Diasporas
Instructor: Professor Nandi Bhatia.
Fall Half Course.
From the migration of indentured workers to plantations in the Caribbean, travels to Africa, the displacement and relocation of people during and after the 1947 Partition of India, and the voluntary voyages of economic migrants, diasporic movements from the Indian subcontinent have been deeply entangled in global colonial histories and postcolonial circumstances. 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 theoretical writings by Mishra, Avtar Brah, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, we will read literary texts by Rushdie, Vassanji, Kureishi, Sidhwa, Naipaul and Badami to examine historically contextualized understandings of borders, home, community, nation, exile and diaspora.
