RMS 232: Postcolonial Studies 60 Hours

Course Objectives
• To introduce the students to concepts, concerns, critical debates in translation
studies
• To expose students to the applicability of the theoretical frameworks
• To enable students to critically perceive and engage with production, signification
and negotiation of meanings in translations

Course Description
5 Hrs
Theorising
Edward Said: ‘Introduction’ in Orientalism
Stephen Slemon: ‘Post-colonial Critical Theories’

Encountering Modernity 10 Hrs

Michel Foucault ‘What is Enlightenment?’,
Bernard Yack, ‘Imagining the Modern Age’,
Udaya Kumar, Seeing and Reading: The Early Malayalam Novel and Some Questions of
Visibility, in Early Novels in India,
Ashis Nandy, ‘History’s Forgotten Doubles’
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Subaltern Histories and Post-Enlightenment Rationalism’

Language, and Education 5 Hrs

Gauri Viswanathan. ‘Introduction’ in Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule
in India
Peter Childs. ‘Introduction: Colonial History, National Identity and ‘English’ Literature’
in Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature: A Reader.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. ‘The Burden of English’

History, Time and Memory 10 Hrs

Michel Foucault, ‘History’
Reinhart Koselleck, ‘History, Histories and Formal Time Structures’, in Futures Past,
Maurice Halbwachs, ‘Historical Memory and Collective Memory’
Hayden White, ‘The Historical Imagination – Between Metaphor and Irony’

Nation and Gender 10 Hrs

David Lloyd. ‘Adulteration and the Nation’
Partha Chatterjee. ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’
Ratish Radhakrishnan. ‘Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity’
Rajeshwari Sundar Rajan. “Representing Sati: Continuities and Discontinuities
Karen McCarthy Brown. ‘Fundamentalism and the Control of Women’
Sussie Taru and K. Lalita. ‘Introduction’ Women Writing In India: 600 B.C. To the
Present. Vol. I.

Hybridity, Diaspora 5 Hrs

Bromley, Roger. ‘Introduction: The Third Scenario’
Pramod Nayar. Hybridity, Diaspora, Cosmopolitanism

Body and Performance 5 Hrs

Russell McDougall. ‘The Body as Cultural Signifier’
Helen Gilbert. Dance, ‘Movement and Resistance Politics’

Postcolonialism in Textual Studies 10 Hrs

Study of the following texts in the background of the themes/concepts discussed earlier
William Shakespeare: The Tempest
Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
David Lean: A Passage to India
Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses
Ashutosh Gowarikar: Lagan
Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra: Rang de Basanti
M. F. Husain: ‘Mother India(?)’

Bibliography
Ashcroft et al. (eds) The Post-colonial Studies Reader, London: Routledge, 1995
Ashcroft et al. The Empire Writes Back, London:Routledge, 1989
Ashcroft, Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies, London:
Routledge, 1998
Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994
Boehmer, Elleke, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Oxford: OUP, 1995
Bromley, Roger. Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions.
Edinburgh. Edinburgh UP, 2000.
Castle, Gregory. Ed. Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Childs and Williams. An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory, London: Prentice Hall,
1997
Childs, Peter. Post –Colonial Theory and English Literature: A Reader. Edinburg:
Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Dipesh Chakrabarty. Habitations of Modernity – Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies.
New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002.
Halbwachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory. USA, Harper and Row, 1980.
Innes, CL. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English. New
Delhi: CUP, 2007.
Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Mcleod, John, Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2000
Mukherjee, Meenakshi. ed. Early Novels in India. Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2002.
Nandy, Ashis. ed. The Romance of the State, and the Fate of Dissent in the Tropics. New
Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2002
Rabinow , P. ed. The Foucault Reader, New York, Pantheon Books, 1984,
Said, Edward, Orientalism, London: Penguin, 1978
Yack, Bernard. The Fetishism of Modernities: Epochal Self-Consciousness in
Contemporary Social and Political Thought. Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1997