English 281a	R. Mohan
TTH 2:30-4p.m.	HUIII

The course will look at representations of the British colonial encounter in a range of texts. Our aim will be to map an important development in British culture between the 18th and 20th centuries during which national identity was articulated increasingly in terms of empire, initially seen as the promise of profit and adventure and later as the "white man's burden." Our analysis will focus on various tropes that were repeatedly drawn upon to depict the imperial project. Among others, we will focus on the tropes of travel, quest, adventure, theft, rape, threatening enigma, androgyny, and "going native." To the extent that these motifs structure various accounts of the colonial encounter and manage the contradictions between liberal humanist or Christian ideals and the imperial project, our investigations will lead us to the ideological and psychic investments in narrative representations of otherness. Postcolonial fictions of empire will also be read as attempts to rewrite the colonial encounter from the other side of the cultural and historical divide.

To explore the currency of imperial fictions in our own times that are vastly different from, and yet strikingly similar in some ways to, the heyday of British imperialism, we will be viewing cinematic representations of imperialism and otherness that draw freely on the tropes we will be studying.

Required texts:

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Rider Haggard, She

Rudyard Kipling, Kim

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

David Malouf, Remembering Babylon

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Caryl Phillips, Cambridge

A nineteenth century children's adventure novel or a travel narrative about Africa chosen by each student in consultation with me and the reference librarian.

Essays by Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, Edward Said, Mary Louise Pratt, Abena Busia, Homi Bhabha, and Salman Rushdie

Course requirements:

Written work: One short paper, 4-5 pages long; two 3-page reports, one on a film and another on the supplementary text of your choice; and a final research paper of about 15 pages.

This course fulfills the Social Justice Requirement