Professor: Marcel Brousseau
4 credits
This course examines how Indigenous and other decolonial imaginations encounter and resist the imaginations of colonial travelers. Engaging in what Edward Said calls “contrapuntal reading,” we will read colonial and Indigenous texts in critical comparison, following a broad historical arc from the classical world to the present day. Our diverse readings—which include epic, exploration chronicles, 19th- and 20th-century novels, maps, poems, films, television shows, and computer games—represent historic and futuristic contact zones, including the ancient Mediterranean; New Spain and New France; the colonial circuit of Europe and Africa; Louisiana; the Oregon Trail; the Moon and Mars. These disparate media trace what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “copresen[t], interacti[ve], interlocking understandings and practices [and] . . . radically asymmetrical relations of power" that occur when cultures encounter one another. As we hone our skills of comparative literary analysis, we will also develop strategies for analyzing how different media technologies reimagine political and cultural relations over time, and how we might envision the textual and political possibilities of future contact zones.