WiSe 18/19: S-Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Border Thinking
Cordula Lemke
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Borders are everywhere: all our lives we are concerned with crossing borders, drawing borders, transgressing borders or keeping borders intact. We follow well-trodden paths or stray from them, we ... read more
Borders are everywhere: all our lives we are concerned with crossing borders, drawing borders, transgressing borders or keeping borders intact. We follow well-trodden paths or stray from them, we adapt our rituals to given borders or we resist. The materiality of borders can have a physical impact on our movements like the Berlin wall, but borders can also be semantically charged with a variety of meanings that determine the way we think about the world by e.g. creating a “wall in our heads”. In this seminar we will not just look at the way borders are created, but we will also consider how movement impacts on border thinking. We will ask what crossing borders means, how liminal spaces affect borders and what border crossing entails for literary texts and other media.
The class will be co-taught by Lenka Filipova.
Texts:
Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide
Jackie Kay, Trumpet
Hanif Kureishi, The Black Album
