English 277 - POSTCOLONIAL WOMEN WRITERS

A comparative study of 20th-century women writers in English from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and Australia. We read novels, short stories, poetry, plays and autobiography in their historical, cultural and political contexts as well as theoretical essays to address questions such as: How have women writers addressed the dual challenge of contesting sexism and patriarchy from within their indigenous cultures as well as the legacies of western imperialism from without? How have they combined feminism with anti-colonialism? How have they deployed the act of writing as cultural work on multiple counts: addressing multiple audiences; challenging different stereotypes about gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity? What new stories have they told to counter older stories, what silences have they broken? How have they renegotiated the public and the private, or called attention to areas often ignored by their male contemporaries, such as relations among women, familial dynamics, motherhood, b