MLU
Seminar: Postcolonial Cultural Autobiography - Vertiefungsmodul: Kulturwissenschaft I + III + IV - Details
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General information

Course name Seminar: Postcolonial Cultural Autobiography - Vertiefungsmodul: Kulturwissenschaft I + III + IV
Course number ANG.05294.03; ANG.06137.02; ANG.06145.02
Semester SoSe 2023
Current number of participants 13
expected number of participants 20
Home institute British and American Studies
Courses type Seminar in category Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen
First date Wednesday, 12.04.2023 10:15 - 11:45, Room: Seminarraum 11 (R.2.39) [EA 26-27]
Pre-requisites Erfolgreich absolviertes Basismodul: Einführung in das Studium der angloamerikanischen Kulturwisenschaft (FSQ integrativ)
Performance record Studienleistung: Textlektüre and Kurzreferat
Prüfungsleistung: Referat (project proposal) und mündliche Prüfung (30min)
SWS 2
ECTS points 5

Module assignments

Comment/Description

How do you deal with personal and cultural heritage if there are no sources in the private or communal archives that provide any information about "your people"? There is a glaring absence of diaries, letters, and other forms of life writing when it comes to colonized people and regions. This is not because enslaved or colonized people did not produce any such documents but because they have not been archived. We are going to look at strategies of dealing with this and of writing the self in a postcolonial Anglophone world with a focus on Great Britain. In particular, we are going to study autobiographical texts by scholars and writers Hazel Carby and Bernardine Everisto. We are looking at their methods of constructing and exploring their personal and "cultural" selves and their heritage such as imagining a past or creating intertextual and intermedial relations.

This is a reading intensive course as we are going to read three autobiographies and some secondary sources that discuss postcolonial life-writing. However, the autobiographies are entertaining, very touching, and very instructive when it comes to the lives and experiences of (post-)colonial subjects in the twentieth and twenty-first century. In the end, we will study British history via personal reports, thereby combining literary and cultural studies.

Required Reading:
Bernadine Everisto, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up, 2021.
Hazel V. Carby, Imperial Intimacies. A Tale of Two Islands, 2019

some additional secondary sources (articles)

Link for in class work on slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/15cTwWOwzmiWkB_9Qfu_wlzS5zxHuyStZ1MbUeK9XlYw/edit?usp=sharing