Postcolonial Life-Writing

In the last decades, postcolonial writers have participated in the great popularity of life-writing, spreading in several regions of the Western world, especially the UK and North America, interweaving personal experience into global perspectives on colonialism, independence movement, and the emergence of postcolonial nations, thus rendering different angles and knowledges to this literary genre. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (1992), Bart Moore-Gilbert (2009) and Jocelyn Still (2018) have played a pivotal role in shaping and defining the genre of postcolonial life writing. The seminar takes its lead from Still, who claims that “postcolonial life-writing, embedded as it is in generic expectations of telling a ‘true’ story, can serve as a proving ground for some of the central debates and themes within postcolonial studies” (2018, 177). The prime focus of the seminar is life-writing from Asia, Africa, and the Arab world and its engagement with memory and history, experiences of colonised and formerly colonised people, ‘how the subalterns speak’, cultural stereotyping and transcultural dynamics, political violence and resistance, gender and feminism, agency and victimhood, internal and external sense of displacement and exile, rewriting the self and identity, among several other aspects. The main objective of the course is to introduce students to the genre of postcolonial life-writing and how it is defined in the domain of postcolonial studies and is refashioned by postcolonial writers, and how writing becomes a tool of resisting imperialism and exercising agency. At the same, students will also learn how this particular genre urges the reader to turn to multiple marginalized viewpoints, and how it provides a platform for witnessing and testimony and for archiving personal, cultural, and national histories. By thinking beyond the more traditional, Eurocentric definitions of life-writings as focused on a singular, colonial often masculine self, students are introduced to a variety of life-writings, particularly from Asia, Africa, and the Arab world,  that act as a vehicle for expressing ‘the double consciousness’ of postcolonial writers and a means of theorizing postcolonial histories and subjectivities. Upon completion of the course, it is expected that students can show their understanding of postcolonial theory and life writing in the form of class presentation and response or term paper.