Anticolonial Thought

Course Description

This course looks at the traditions of anticolonial thought from the early twentieth century to the present day. Comparing movements for national liberation, realignment, and literary self-determination from across the Americas and around the world, we consider the shifting claims of empires and the colonial subjects, anticolonial frameworks, and decolonial movements that sought to contest these formations. We’ll focus largely on the Americas and the Caribbean, where the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and American empires all competed, but we’ll also consider these movements in their worldwide adventure, a “global” perspective that accounts for how processes of decolonization were understood in Ireland, India, China, and elsewhere. Our focus will often be on manifestoes and essays in which anticolonial writers outlined their literary and political programs, but we’ll also look at a few poems, stories, and films. From Lenin and DuBois’s calls to think about the relationship between racial capitalism and imperialism to Getino and Solanas’s revolutionary cinema protesting American neocolonialism, how have the claims of anticolonial political thought found their expression?

Code

AS.060.396

Credits

3

Subject

English