ENGLISH 9092 ~
Vulnerability in Black Atlantic Life Writing
Professor Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi
Summer 2013, Full Course.
This seminar brings into dialogue recent work by scholars of postcolonial studies and auto/biography studies. It responds to two calls that have animated both fields: 1) the pleas to rethink contemporary neo-liberal cultures through returns to colonial archives, and 2) the demands to articulate the particularities of postcolonial life-writing as a subgenre. Focusing on the work of Caribbean, African and Black British writers, participants, in this seminar, will examine how and why life-writing functions as a fruitful site at which to study the afterlives of colonialism. Drawing from the spectacular revelations of differential vulnerabilities, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, we will examine the cultural work of writers, scholars, and activists who narrativize the African diaspora as relationships to risk. At the end of this seminar, participants should be able to identify the basic theoretical debates about postcolonial life-writing, to understand the critical impetus behind the recent returns to colonial archives, and, most crucially, to articulate prevalent formats in these narratives of vulnerability. Our primary texts will come from writers such as Wangari Maathai, Caryl Phillips, Jamaica Kincaid, Kwame Nkrumah, Wole Soyinka, Edwige Danticat, and Thomas Glave. Theoretical readings will include scholarship from Philip Holden, Gillian Whitlock, Judith Butler, Sidonie Smith, Achille Mbembe, Dipesh Chakrabarty, David Scott, and Brent Hayes Edwards.