Race, Empire & Identity Politics
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
What constitutes race, racism, and racial identity? In the wake of post-Columbian expansionism and imperialism, the European contact with non-white, non-Christian, non-European peoples unleashed a slew of anxieties and yearnings, exploitations and transactions, assimilations and delimitations, and associations and subjugations. For better or worse, this fatal contact with the racialised “other” has since left an indelible mark – or more accurately, an impact crater – on Western literary imagination, intellectual discourse, political formation, and socioeconomic configuration. In this unit, we will examine a range of challenges and frissons resulting from various unions, divisions, and confrontations between the self-identified master race and the forcefully branded slave race in Western literature. To that end, our investigation will begin with a survey of both recent and established theoretical frameworks informing contemporary discussions of racial difference and postcolonial writing. After considering these contexts, we shall delve into Shakespeare’s racially charged Othello, and plumb the depths of the eponymous hero’s homicidal jealousy as well as the complex interweaving of racial attitudes embedded in his troubled relationship with the Venetian masters. Finally, the course concludes with a rigorous analysis of Joseph Conrad’s notoriously impenetrable, yet surprisingly compressed, modernist novella, Heart of Darkness. Rife with allusions and tortuous tropes, the narrator’s opaque characterisation of the African “other” and self-mutilating depiction of the European “self” are as controversial as they are provocative. Through these texts, we will, hopefully, make an instructive and reflexive foray into our own convoluted world of racial constructs and the painfully real inequities attending them.
PRIMARY READING TEXTS:
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Ed. with intro. and notes by Owen Knowles. London: Penguin Books, 2007.
Shakespeare, William. Othello. Ed. E. A. J. Honigmann. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1997.
SECONDARY READING TEXTS:
Boehmer, Elleke. “Postcolonialism.” Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Ed. Patricia Vaugh. Oxford: OUP, 2006.
Kerr, Kathleen. “Race, Nation, and Ethnicity.” Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Ed. Patricia Vaugh. Oxford: OUP, 2006.