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This MA offers an unusually wide historical and geographical exploration of colonial conquest, national identities, anti-colonial resistance and post-colonial struggles. Students can study these interconnected human experiences from the Middle Ages through to the present day, across all the continents.
The MA recognises both disciplinary and interdisciplinary dimensions of the field; all of the modules involve questions of culture, history and politics, but some modules allow students to explore a discipline--literature, politics, film--in particular detail. Another distinction of this MA programme is its commitment to comparative study. Thus it offers an array of modules that allows a comparative understanding of different European and American empires, and also encourages a comparative study of African, Asian, Irish, Latin American, Pacific responses to the experience of colonisation. Students will also be able to explore the transnational elements of cultural production and reception.
There is one core (compulsory) module, in the autumn term, Postcolonial Studies. This introduces and explores theoretical debates. Rather than take 'post-colonial' as an unproblematic term, the module addresses the intellectual, aesthetic and material stakes involved in its deployment, and situates the term in relation to earlier anti-colonial and liberationist formulations. Students take three other option modules, one in autumn and two in spring term, and devote their summer term and break to research and writing a 20,000 word dissertation. The MA can also be taken part-time over two years. Students are able to take options from other MA programmes.
The Cultures of Empire option modules will vary from year to year according to staff availability (and will run subject to minimum numbers) but may include those described below.
* British Orientalisms in the Long Eighteenth Century; this module explores the cultural impact of the wide range of British writing about 'the East', especially the Middle East and India, in the long eighteenth century. Particular attention will be paid to the changing preoccupations and conventions of representation that informed works of fiction, poetry, and travel in the period
* Contact and Conflict: Ireland and the New World; this course explores issues of conflict - and gestures towards conflict resolution - against a background of colonial expansion, overseas unrest and domestic tensions. It examines how literary genres respresented and, often, elided social conflict and the voices of dissidence and otherness. It tests the effectiveness of critical discourses like New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, feminism, postcolonial studies in challenging those elisions and recovering the conflictual texture of the period. This module has a strong comparative-literature element and it is attentive to modern Irish and Latin-American literary responses to and rewritings of early-modern, colonial texts
* Cultural Identity in Anglo-Saxon Literature; Early Medieval England is marked by its precocious use of the vernacular written word. This module considers the cultural implications of this phenomenon through the examination of a range of Old English and Latin texts from Anglo-Saxon England. The module attempts to study Old English away from simple oppositions of literacy and orality, Roman and Germanic, secular and religious, and with an awareness of how a desire for origins has shaped the subject of Old English and perceptions of the Anglo-Saxon past since the Norman Conquest.
* Gendering the Exotic, Exoticising Gender; the subject of this module is the interaction between ideas, images, and practices associated with gender, and those associated with imperial, racial, and colonial developments in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and France. It will examine how the history and patterns of gender identities, differences and relationships were shaped by the imperial racialising and colonialist features of those societies, and how those features were in turn shaped by gender considerations
* The Idea of Partition: Literary Representations from India/Pakistan, Israel/Palestine, and Ireland; this course brings together twentieth-century narratives by writers from India/Pakistan, Israel/Palestine, and Ireland/Northern Ireland in order to investigate the literary representation of partition from a comparative standpoint.Many of the narratives we will read share important thematic and aesthetic characteristics, including a scepticism towards grand narratives, a penchant for developing alternative or hyper-real historical scenarios, and above all, an interest in the political and psychological costs of partition
* The Novel in Africa; what happens to the novel when it is unmoored from its socio-cultural origins in eighteenth-century Europe and taken up by writers working under colonial and postcolonial conditions? In particular, how do African conditions of authorship require us to re-think the novel's aesthetic and ideological possibilities? This course examines the varied publics of African fiction, the cultural influences acting upon it (both European and indigenous), and the form's history and varied achievements in Africa. In doing so, it also asks how the theory and literary history of the novel has been extended through contact with the African continent
* Re-appropriating The Stereotype: Representations of Sexuality in Francophone Caribbean Literature; This module will introduce to a number of short stories and novels by Francophone Caribbean authors, such as Maryse Condé, Edouard Glissant, Dany Laferrière, and René Depestre. It will show, through close readings of texts (in translation), how these writings interact with former images and practices of colonialism, in particular its representations and control of sexuality. More generally, this course will attempt, via a thematic discussion, to give students an insight into the Francophone contribution to postcolonial thought and culture. Excursions into the anglophone world will also be made to encourage dialogue and interaction between the two traditions
* Slaves and Slavery; the course will introduce students to a range of materials (demographic, economic, iconographic and literary) necessary for the historical reconstruction of slavery. Students will also study the rich historiography of slavery. In the course of Atlantic slavery some 11 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic, transforming the face of Africa, the Americas and enhancing the material well-being of Europe. By concentrating on the English-speaking world we will explore the complex evolution of distinct slave communities in North America and the West Indies. At heart the system was economic, designed to make the best use of slave labour in tapping the wealth of the region. Throughout, slave resistance was ubiquitous, and the slave-owning class struggled to maintain its control. Eventually of course, slavery was brought to an end. We will explore why so thriving an institution was ended
* South African Literatures; the central focus of this option will be the South African novel written English during the period 1970 to the present, but some attention will be given to earlier literature and to other genres. The course will raise questions about - among other things - the distinctiveness of South African writing, the role of literature in the resistance to apartheid, the conditions experienced by women and their representation in literature, and the challenges presented to writers by the post-apartheid period
* South African Politics; through in-depth reading this module investigates key issues and problems of contemporary South Africa with reference to the legacy of the past for the society's present and future
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