Empire, Gender, and Sexuality
Elaine Freedgood profile
R-5:30-8:10
This course will put some major literary works associated with the British Raj and Indian Independence into dialogue with historical, anthropological, sociological and psychoanalytic works on colonialism and sexuality. We will ask questions about how race, gender and sexuality are imagined in cross-cultural contexts. Specific literary works will include Kipling's novel *Kim*; E.M. Forster's *A Passage to India*; Walt Whitman's poem, "A Passage to India"; Gandhi's *Autobiography*; Rushdie's *Midnight's Children* and Arundhati Roy's *God of Small Things.* Works from other disciplines will include Percival Spear's History of India, works by the Subaltern Studies historians, Foucault's History of Sexuality, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, Ashis Nandy's anthropological study, The Intimate Enemy, Eve Sedgwick's The Epistemology of the Closet, psychoanalytic studies of colonialism by Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon. We will see a film version of at least one of the primary texts. Class presentations will bring extra-literary context to bear on a literary work and will be predicated on wide-ranging research skills that we will discuss in class; these presentations will be worked into longer papers over the course of the semester.
updated 2006-11-03
