Advanced Studies In Postcolonial Literature

AY2020/2021 Semester 1

HL4038 Advanced Studies in Postcolonial Literature highlights the challenges faced by writers from the global south, namely domestication/exoticism which denies and subverts alterity. Such concerns are linked to the increasingly popular sub-geme, "postcolonial gothic", which is read as an ambivalent means to circumvent commodification. Encoun- ters with the uncarmy/unheimlich (unhomely) and the abject in these texts unveil deep- seated anxieties regarding race, gender, class, and power, and these are collated with the way that the gothic reconfigures or destabilizes identity, especially as it relates to larger notions of nationhood, history, and belonging. Texts may include Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008), Raja Rao's Kanthapura (1938/1970), Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, and Beth Yahp's The Crocodile Sea.