HU Credits: 4

Degree/Cycle: 2nd degree (Master)

Responsible Department: Cultural Studies-Individual Graduate Prog.

Semester: Yearly

Teaching Languages: English

Campus: Mt. Scopus

Course/Module Coordinator: Louise Bethlehem

Coordinator Email: louise.bethlehem@mail.huji.ac.il

Coordinator Office Hours: Tuesday 15:00 - 16:00

Teaching Staff:
Prof Louise Bethlehem

Course/Module description:
Postcolonial theory explores the impact of European colonization upon the societies which it subjugated, recognizing that the cultural and political struggles which colonization set in motion continue to influence the present. Central concerns relate to the impact of European languages, institutions and epistemologies on colonized societies. When it came into being as an academic field, the foundational gesture of postcolonialism consisted in uncovering the link between Western knowledge systems, exemplified through Edward Said’s notion of “Orientalism,” and the maintenance of colonial power. As a historiographical method and mode of literary or cultural analysis, postcolonialism orients itself to the struggles of all sectors of colonial society, both elite and popular, in order to analyze colonialism and the opposition it engendered. Many early interventions in postcolonial theory were concerned with forms of resistance on the part of the colonized, and explored the struggles over racialized identity and gender, as well as representations of place and history in a colonial setting. The course traces the indebtedness of these ideas to traditions of anti-colonial thought expressed in the writings of Frantz Fanon and others. At the same time, it moves beyond what might be called a postcolonial canon to examine the manner in which the legacies of postcolonial theory are currently being challenged by paradigms such as settler colonial theory and decolonial theory. Settler colonial theory interrogates the manner in which the hegemonic repression and elimination of indigenous people normalizes and perpetuates continuous structures of settler occupation. Decolonial theory for its part counters European accounts of modernity that is sees as fundamental to Western imperialism while orienting itself to the manner in which the European conquest replaced indigenous knowledge systems and practices. Throughout the course, these concerns will be treated in relation to works of expressive culture: cinema, literary texts and visual culture.

Course/Module aims:
The course aims to present central concepts of canonical postcolonial theory and to discuss the historical contexts which gave rise to them. Such concepts include Franz
Fanon’s phenomenological exploration of blackness and his spatialized reading
of colonial history; Edward Said’s “Orientalism”; Homi Bhabha’s notions of
ambivalence, mimicry and hybridity; the concept of subalternity that the
Subaltern Studies collective developed on the basis of the work of Antonio Gramsci;
the gendering of subalternity in the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; as well as
the correlation between colonialism and nationalism in the work of Dipesh
Chakrabarty. It supplements this canonical lexicon with terms and concepts emerging from contending paradigms, such as Patrick Wolfe’s “logic of elimination” and Walter Mignolo’s elaborations of “decoloniality.”

Learning outcomes - On successful completion of this module, students should be able to:
Students will be able to identify case-studies suited to the approaches they have learnt and to apply a relevant theoretical lexicon to their analysis of literary and cinematic texts or other objects of study. Students will be capable of tracing the genealogy of key terms in the field and will be encouraged to conceptualize new terms. Students will be able to communicate their findings in the context of peer-to-peer learning activities and a concluding research paper.

Attendance requirements(%):
100

Teaching arrangement and method of instruction: On-campus seminar with 2-3 asynchronous online tutorial sessions per semester

Course/Module Content:
A schedule of readings, short stimuli and forum requirements will be distributed during the first lesson of each semester.

Topics for study include
Discourse and Orientalism
Epidermal Racism
Intimacy in the Ordering of Colonial Hierarchies
The Subaltern
The Archive and History from Below
Hybridity, Ambivalence, Mimicry
Settler Colonialism
Decoloniality
Postcolonialism in the Anthropocene

Required Reading:
Selected possible texts include:

Semester One
Anderson, Benedict
1983 “Introduction,” and “Cultural Roots,” in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso).

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin
2007 “Ambivalence”; “Hybridity”; “Mimicry” in Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts (New York and London: Routledge). [Each term listed there separately].

Bhabha, Homi K.
1994 “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism” in The Location of Culture 66-92 (London and New York: Routledge).

Chakrabarty, Dipesh
1994 “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for Indian Pasts,” in The New Historicism Reader, edited by H. Aram Veeser, 342-69 (New York and London: Routledge).

Fanon, Frantz
2008 (1967). “The Fact of Blackness,” in Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. C. L. Markmann, Foreword to the 1986 edition by Homi K. Bhaba; Foreword to the 2008 edition by Ziauddin Sardar. (London: Pluto Press).

Freud, S. 2001 (1922). “Medusa’s head.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. under the general editorship of J. Strachey, in collaboration with A.Freud, assisted by A. Strachey and A. Tyson. Vol. 18, 273 –4. London: Vintage, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.

Huddart, David
2006 “The Stereotype,” in Homi K. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge).

Kincaid, Jamaica
1997 “In History,” Callaloo 20(1):1-7.
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth&eq;0&type&eq;summary&url&eq;/journals/callaloo/v024/24.2kincaid.pdf

Landry, Donna and Gerald Maclean
1996 “Introduction: Reading Spivak,” in The Spivak Reader (London and New York: Routledge).

Mbembe, Achille
2012 “Metamorphic Thought: The Works of Frantz Fanon,” African Studies 71(1): 19-28.

Morris, Rosalind
2010 “Introduction,” in Can the Subaltern Speak: Reflections on the History of an Idea, edited by Rosalind Morris, 1-17. (New York: Columbia UP).

Muller, Adam
2007 “Notes towards a Theory of Nostalgia: Childhood and the Evocation of the Past in Two European ‘Heritage’ Films. New Literary History, 37(4): 739-760.

Prakash, Gyan. “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” in Cultures of Empire, edited by Catherine Hall, 120-136. (New York: Routledge).

Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder 2010 “Speaking of (Not) Hearing: Death and the Subaltern,” in Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea,” edited by Rosalind C. Morris, 117-138 (New York: Columbia University Press).

Said, Edward
2006 [1978] “Orientalism” in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, 24-27 (London and New York: Routledge).

Sanders, Mark. 2006. “Literature, Reading and Transnational Literacy,” in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory, 1-29. (London: Continuum).

Shohat, Ella
(2006) Travelling ‘Postcolonial’, Third Text, 20:3-4, 287-291, DOI:
10.1080/09528820600855402

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty
1988 (1985). “Can the subaltern speak?” In Marxism and the interpretation of culture, eds. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, 271 –313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura
2002 “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender and Morality in the Making of Race” in Carnal
Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Watson, Ruth
2007. “Beholding the Colonial Past in Claire Dénis’s Chocolat” in Black and White in Color:African History on Screen, edited by Vivian Beckford-Smith and Richard Mendelsohn, 185-202 (Oxford: James Currey).

Semester Two
Azoulay, Ariella. 2011. “Archive” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon http://www.politicalconcepts.org/issue1/archive/

Azoulay, Ariella. 2013. “When a Demolished House Becomes a Public Square,” in Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, edited by Ann Laura Stoler, 194-224 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

Azoulay, Ariella. 2013. “When a Demolished House Becomes a Public Square,” in Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, edited by Ann Laura Stoler, 194-224 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change." New Literary History, vol. 43 no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-18. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/nlh.2012.0007

Coward, Martin. 2007. "'Urbicide' Reconsidered." Theory & Event, vol. 10 no. 2. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/tae.2007.0056

Fanon, Franz 1963 The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Books) [extract on Moodle]

Foucault, Michel 1967 “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” http://www.foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/foucault.heterotopia.en.html

Grinberg, Omri. 2016. “Radical Indeterminancies: Affirmations and Subversions of the Separation Wall—The Case of the Palestinian Children of the Junction,” Journal of Borderlands Studies, DOI: 10.1080/08865655.2016.1174600.

Leshem, Noam. 2011. “A Rough and Charmless Place: Other Spaces of History in Tel Aviv,” in Urban Constellations, edited by Matthew Gandy163-66. (Berlin: Jovis).

Leshem, Noam. 2016. “Housing Complex” in Life after Ruin, 131-157 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Le Vine, Mark. 2004. “Planning to Conquer: Modernity and its Antinomies in the ‘New-Old Jaffa’” in Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and the Zionist Discourse, 192-224. (Aldershot: Ashgate).

Mbembe, Achille. 2002. “The Power of the Archive and its Limits,” in Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton, et al (Dordrecht: Springer).
Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15(1): 11-40. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11

Mbembe, Achille. 2004. “Aesthetics of Superfluity,” Public Culture 16(3): 373–405

Monterescu, Daniel. 2007. “Heteronomy: The Cultural Logic of Urban Space and Sociality in Jaffa” in Mixed Town, Trapped Communities: Historical Narratives, Spatial Dynamics, Gender Relations and Cultural Encounters in Palestinian-Israeli Towns, edited by Dan Rabinowitz and Daniel Monterescu (London: Ashgate).

Morris, Rosalind C. (2008). “The Miner's Ear” Transition 98, 96-114.


Nixon, Rob. 2005. "Environmentalism and Postcolonialism." Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Ed. Ania Loomba and Suvir Kaul, 233-51 (Durham: Duke UP).


Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera. 2014. “Palestinian Children as Tools for ‘Legalized’ State Violence,” Borderlands 13(1). Online. www.borderlands.net.au.

Stoler, Ann Laura 2008 “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural Anthropology 23(2): 191-219

Walter, Patrick F. (2016). Spectral Alphabets: Photography, Necropolitics, and the Marikana Massacre. Cultural Critique 93, 1-31. University of Minnesota Press.

Van Onselen, Charles 1982 “The World the Mine Owners Made: Social Themes in the Economic Transformation of the Witwatersrand, 1886-1914” Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886-1914, 1-43 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press).

Yacobi, Haim. 2016. “The Racialization of Space,” in Israel and Africa: A Geneaology of Moral Geography, 91-108. (London: Routledge).

Additional Reading Material:
Recommended additional reading
Quayson, Ato
2000 Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

Said, Edward
1978 Orientalism (New York: Pantheon).

Young, Robert J.C.
2003 Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press

Course/Module evaluation:
End of year written/oral examination 0 %
Presentation 0 %
Participation in Tutorials 10 %
Project work 30 %
Assignments 0 %
Reports 0 %
Research project 50 %
Quizzes 0 %
Other 10 %
Forums

Additional information:
Class participation means:
advance preparation of weekly material, attendance, actively contributing to the unfolding discussion.


Project work will be conducted in pairs (peer-to-peer learning).