Literature in the Postcolony

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Literature in the Postcolony


In the Research Master course “Literature in the Postcolony” we study literature as a transcultural phenomenon, with specific focus on postcolonial contestations of hegemonic, global relations of power. Literature can always be a mediator between cultures and help re-define and shift cultural borders. With that in mind and with specific focus on Caribbean literature, the course examines literary writings that powerfully contribute to re-imagining communities and values in what Achille Mbembe has called “the postcolony”. We touch among other things on the transcultural traveling of concepts (such as ‘freedom’); on the afterlives of slavery and on how the practices of survival these afterlives brought and bring forth are mediated in art and literature; on the revolutionary potential of language, looking especially at the decolonial inflections of French in Francophone Caribbean literature. We discuss the different roles of poetry and prose in the crafting of new ‘nation languages’ (Brathewaite); Relation (Glissant) as shifted onto-epistemological approach to identity formations and cultural collectives; linguistic and cultural translation as condition to intra-act in the postcolony. Underlying to all these discussions is an interest in entanglement. How do we come to understand transculturality and literary production in the postcolony, if we approach it through the lens of entanglement?


The ‘cultural maps’ displayed on the webpage are the product of several successive years of course work. When making such a map, students are asked to zoom in on a cultural phenomenon, a geo-political space, or a prominent figure or event in Caribbean life in order to experiment with alternative forms of presentation (other than the academic research paper) and think about in how far their chosen ‘topic’ or ‘object’ has come (or continues to come) into being as transculturally entangled phenomenon. What can one render visible in a ‘map’ and how does this correspond to textual presentation? What media or materials are most suitable to the presentation one hopes to achieve?

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