ENGL 365 Contemporary Literature

Violence and Representation

This course will interrogate Fanon's assertions that the colonized find their freedom only through violence, and that decolonization is always a violent process, by considering the structuring dialectics between violence, the body, and postcolonial narratives of insurgency. If, for Fanon, decolonization is both literally and linguistically an adopted violence, so that militancy against colonialism is an answer back in the imported language of destruction that the colonizer best understands, our goal will be to investigate the complex and shifting relations to violence/violation that postcolonial texts elaborate when they represent insurgent anticolonial practices. By looking closely at how postcolonial narratives represent insurgencies against power and their attendant violence, we will arrive at an analytic for addressing the technologies of pain, trauma, brutality, torture, and repression that conditioned regimes of colonial discipline and control. We will also consider the extent to which postcolonial texts appropriate an apparatus of violence in representing bodies in rebellion, while also articulating alternative visions of resistance and social change that specifically refuse the ethics of extremism. Our inquiry will draw from a critical discourse on corporeality (Foucault, Scarry), the nation (Fanon, Anderson), and gender (Butler, Spivak) to illuminate the peculiar charge in narratives of insurgency between the embodied politics of militancy and the body politic. Finally, the texts that we will be reading, deal, in some way, with the problematic of form (how to represent the urgency of politicized violence as a condition of modernity), and, in so doing, reach beyond realist conventions to reflect aspects of the surreal, the grotesque, the spectacular, and the magically real. We will assess the efficacy of these forms and their overwrought symbolism in managing the economy between the public and the private victims and perpetrators, masculinity and femininity, and whites and blacks, which structured the play of colonial violence itself. Over the course of the term, we will be reading writers as diverse as Roy, Coetzee, Al-Shaykh, Djebar, Salih, and viewing films such as The Terrorist, Bandit Queen, and The Battle of Algiers. Major requirement met: Group III/IV.