Feminism, Empire and Postcoloniality

Semester and Year	FA 2012
Course Number	IDSEM-UG1523
Section	001
Instructor	Marie Cruz Soto
Days	Tue,Thu
Time	11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
Units	4.0
Level	U
Foundation Requirement	HUM, GLOBAL

Description

Jamaica Kincaid once said, “I now consider anger as a badge of honor. [It is] the first step to claiming yourself.” Anger, rather than Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name,” has haunted the life of many women whose negotiations of the meaning of gender, race and sexuality are marked by the violence of colonial-imperial encounters. Accordingly, this course examines the following questions: How have colonial-imperial encounters shaped the imagination of gender, race and sexuality? How have women built feminist solidarities amidst, or perhaps based on, the shared experience of violence and anger? In turn, how has the imagination of gender, race and sexuality redefined the histories of colonies and empires? To pursue these questions, course readings include literary and other scholarly texts engaging feminist and postcolonial theory. Readings range from Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and Rigoberta Menchú’s I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala  to other texts by scholars like Uma Narayan, Patricia Mohammed, Vandana Shiva, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Ann Stoler.

Syllabus

IDSEM-UG1523

Course Type

Interdisciplinary Seminars (IDSEM-UG)