ENGL479Z South Asian Literature on the Move

This course will concentrate exclusively on works by South Asian writers writing in English. South Asia for this class will include India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. It will also include writers from these places who have migrated to North America, the UK, the Caribbean, and Africa. In other words, we will read writers from South Asia and its diaspora.  South Asian anglophone writing, especially fiction and poetry, has a long history going back to British colonialism. Migration of South Asians to other countries can also be traced back as far as the early nineteenth century (even earlier, but we will take the abolition of slavery in 1833 by the British as our starting point). South Asians migrated to the Caribbean and Africa, especially South Africa as indentured, agricultural laborers, and we see a vibrant population in such places as a result of these migrations. The mid-twentieth century saw a different kind of migration to the US, Canada, and the UK as a result of decolonization, globalization, and transnationalism. This is a vast and complicated history much of which is captured and often beautifully rendered in fiction and poetry.

Thus, this course will cover a broad range of writers and writings and examine how writers confront and address issues of migration and adaptation to new worlds. We will discuss the differences between works written by writers living in South Asia and those living elsewhere. What are the differences, say, between a writer like Sanjay Sahota and Jameela Siddiqi? We will discuss the formation of South Asian writing in North America and the UK--how writers experience becoming South Asian Americans or Black British writers and how such formations may differ from say becoming Indo-Caribbean or Indian African. We will note the many ways in which fiction published in, say, India that did not make it to the west is positioned differently than fiction published  in the West. Genres like chick lit, for example, are extremely popular in India. How do we read them alongside now canonical anglophone South Asian writing? Why do writers writing in the US and the UK dominate the field?

We will examine the long durée of anglophone South Asian literature and note the immense popularity and literary prestige of contemporary writers like Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Arvind Adiga, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Mohsin Hamid, and Rohinton Mistry. We shall discuss how earlier writings by Samuel Selvon, V.S, Naipaul, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Kamala Markandaya, and Anita Desai  has helped shape anglophone writing at large. We will consider whether there are differences between writers from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. If so, what produces such differences--politics, gender, religion? Throughout the class, we will pay attention to questions of form and literary aesthetics and discuss how the novel continues to dominate the literary scene in anglophone South Asian literature.  

Students will be responsible for Discussion Board posts on a regular basis. Writing assignments may include several short one-page papers and three or four long papers of 5-7 pages in length.