Postcolonial Literature
Postcolonial studies is a capacious category, representing an expansive and persistently changing field of literary and cultural analysis. In this department, we seek to balance the traditional understanding of the field’s subject matter – literature written by people living in or tracing their descent from the former British empire – with a recognition that the protocols of postcolonial criticism can open up productive sites of inquiry across multiple periods and geographic spaces. With concentrated interests in the Anglophone Caribbean and Ireland, we put emphasis on how the literature from these places speaks more broadly to contemporary issues of race, ethnicity, nationalism, and the exercise of cultural and political power. We are especially interested in examining the metropolitan sites of postcolonial literary production, the counterintuitively transnational roots of national identity, and the ways in which the postcolonial intersects with and intervenes in current theorizations of globalization and world literature.
Faculty Experts
