Thinking postcolonially (terms 1 and 2)

This course focuses on the relation between Britain and its empire in the mid-C19th, looking at the constitution of the nation and the definition of subjects and citizens. The new field of postcolonial studies has done much to open up questions of colonial discourse and the centrality of colonialism to the contemporary world.  The course draws on feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist insights to think about questions of difference in the mid-C19th nation and empire. We shall investigate how English and British identities, both masculine and feminine, were constructed in relation to imagined ‘others’. We shall explore how ‘difference’, the differences associated with class, race, gender and ethnicity, were articulated in a particular national and imperial world. You will be asked to read a range of primary sources – from histories and missionary reports to periodical essays, novels and travel writing. Our method in many of the sessions will be close reading of a particular text. The focus on England will be in its relation to the so-called peripheries – India and Jamaica – and to that particularly complicated terrain of empire, Ireland.

Assessment: two 4,000 word course papers