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COMP_LIT 201-0 : Home and the World: Literature, Law, and Migration (Home and the World: Literature, Law, and Migration )

Description

This course will explore themes of migration, diaspora, and belonging in a variety of literary and visual texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In particular, we will attend to the legacy of colonialism, enslavement, and indenturement in producing conditions of mass displacement for racial and ethnic minorities. Our readings will consist of poetry, novellas, and visual art from three major postcolonial geographies — South Asia (primarily Pakistan and Sri Lanka), the Anglophone Caribbean, and the borderlands of the United States.

By charting the historical and theoretical coordinates of empire, borders, and surveillance in these areas, we will ask the following questions: What is the meaning of home, and how does it differ from conceptualizations of the nation and national identity? Why does the law distinguish between a citizen, a refugee, and an immigrant? How do narratives of migration unsettle conventions of language and literary form? Why is multiculturalism central to the plot of empire? How are diasporic relations structured along the lines of race, class, caste, gender, sexuality, and nationality? Finally, how does the literature of migration employ or challenge categories like ‘world literature’ to establish itself within institutions of literary prestige?

We will draw on theoretical scholarship from postcolonial theory, Black studies, Latinx studies, affect theory, queer of color critique, and translation theory, especially through the writings of Stuart Hall, Hannah Arendt, Jose Munoz, and Gloria Anzaldua. The primary texts will include fiction by Michael Ondaatje, Mohsin Hamid, Valeria Luiselli, Sandra Cisneros; poetry by Safiya Sinclair and R. Cheran; and performance art by Nao Bustamante.