Commodities of Empire: Colonialism, Ecology, Culture

The course includes relevant topics in colonial and postcolonial literature and ecocriticism. The first week introduces students to key concepts of empire, colonialism, postcolonialism, commodity, and culture with excerpts of texts by key postcolonial thinkers such as Said, Spivak, Williams, Lazarus, and Chaudhuri. It also uses a short essay from Dickens on 'cigars' to show how we will be reading literature through their attendant historical, cultural, and socio-ecological contexts. From the second week onward, we will tackle individual commodities and their texts based on fur, opium, statues, land, potato/rice, oil, water and others. The list of texts, given below, will show the extent and breadth of the course expanding upon the world-literary contexts of commodities and colonialism and suggesting how postcolonialism is as much a historical discourse as it is global, every day, and contemporary. The course also includes a walking tour in the fifth week through which students will be able to perceive and contextualise the production of culture and colonialist values in our contemporary world and learn to develop critical frameworks to understand them in the global postcolonial context. Students will be taught through seminar discussion of these texts and their topics which range from race, slavery, gender, sexual violence, nonhuman animals, built environment, dark tourism, disability, oil corporatism, decolonisation, and others. They will also take a walking tour to better inform and understand the contemporary cultural contexts of consumption of colonialist values in the metropolises of empire. They will be further taught through assignments and verbal feedback.   Credit level: 11 Year taken: Postgraduate SCQF credits: 20