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380B English	C. Devenney
T 7:30-10p.m.	HUIII

In each word, each name, each given name and proper name there is the sketch of other words, its hospitable calligraphy. In each word: other words; in each language: the sojourn of other languages. The completely-other always watches over poetic force.

--Abdelkebir Khatibi

Our primary concern this semester will be with the question(s) of migrancy, migration, and with the increasingly uncertain and destabilizing geographical and cultural affiliations of writers regarded as "postcolonial." If, as Homi Bhabha has written, the postcolonial text is a hybrid of languages and forms, then the migrant text is that hybridity in the extreme. Identified neither with the formerly colonized "outskirts" nor with the post-imperial metropolitan centers of Europe, these writings exist tenuously at the interstices of cultural formation and deformation. But the ramifications of this migrant writing may ultimately go past simply the hybridization of cultural formations such as the "novel" and "poetry." In Amitav Ghosh's The Circle of Reason, Zindi the old al-Ghazira prostitute is said to speak a "welter of languages," she can "bring together empty air and give it a body just by talking of it." And Alu, the wanderer, speaks a speech "all stirred together, stamped and boiled, Arabic mixed with Hindi, Hindi swallowing Bengali, English doing a dance; tongues unravelled and woven together." Ultimately, one of the most important questions we will have to explore throughout the semester is whether these migrant (or migrating) texts, while outwardly written in English or French, are in fact "English" or "French," or if they may in fact be closer to what the North African writer Abdelkebir Khatibi calls bilangue. Not a language, not even an other or, following Deleuze, a "minor language," but a bilangue, a bi-language in which body and language, voice and writing, feminine and masculine sexualities, native and foreign languages, as well as hegemonic and marginalized cultures may mingle and mix without merging to form a new unity.

Our readings will be drawn from a number of literary, cultural, regional, and linguistic contexts, including Irish, Caribbean, Indian, North African, and South African. We'll begin with Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, which is a prequel to Brontë's Jane Eyre set in mid-19th-century Jamaica. From this, we'll turn to Beckett's Molloy and examine the ways that it revisions in the mode of caricature the Cartesian narrative of self-knowledge in order to challenge the idea (or ideal) of an authentic nationalist identity. We'll then read J.M. Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K., a text that implicitly transfers certain aspects of Kafka's The Trial to the setting of South African apartheid. Then we'll read two North African writers: Asia Djebar's, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, which takes over, in the context of an autobiographical narrative, various historical accounts of both the French invasion of Algeria and the war for Algerian liberation, and Abdelkibar Khatibi's Love in Two Languages. Finally we will take up two Indian texts, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which is an amazing and dense re-telling of Indian history at the time of independence, and Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, which, in the form of a traditional narrative form makes "narrative" say what it never before said.

Readings

Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Beckett, Molloy

Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K.

Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade

Khatibi, Love in Two Languages

Rushdie, Midnight's Children

Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

*In addition to these, I will put together a fairly substantial list of secondary texts that I'll place on reserve at Magill by writers such as Derrida, Deleuze, Bhabha, Spivak, Said, Lyotard, Chow, Davies, and some others.

Here is a question: how can the difference between Language&emdash;or, Language-as-such--and a language be given to thought? Is this difference something that thought can, as it were, measure, grasp, contain, possess, envelop, encompass, embody? Or is it that any and every attempt to appropriate Language by way of the language in which we speak and write has itself already been appropriated by this difference that exceeds the order of signification? Though applicable to any writing that we may be inclined to call "literary"&emdash;or "philosophical"&emdash;what I would like to explore with you this semester are the ways these questions take on a far more pointed, not to mention political dimension (though we will have to explore in some detail exactly what we mean by "politics") when applied to the cultural and linguistic contexts of what have variously come to be termed "Postcolonial," "Anglophone," "Francophone," and "Third-world" writing; for at the very least, given the troubled and complex cultural and historical contexts out of which they arise, these writings call into question the status of what we call national languages and literatures (hence, given the hegemony of "English" and "French" which they respectively imply, why we may come to see at least "Anglophone" and "Francophone" as problematic terms).