This course is intended, first of all, to serve as a general introduction to postcolonial literature and theory. Toward that end, a number of the most influential theorists of postcolonialism as well as some of the novels that have been of particular importance to debates and discussions in the field will be covered. Particular attention will be given to the problematic disciplinarity of "postcolonial studies": the origins of the term itself and the modes of its differentiation from studies of national liberation and of diaspora; the shift from historical and social-scientific conceptions of the postcolonial to essentially literary-critical ones; the problems and failures of the literary paradigm of postcolonial studies as they became manifest in the 1980s; and the tendency of literary scholars working in this field today to extend the postcolonial across ever broader zones of history and geography.

The aim is for students to be able to understand different approaches to culture, nationalism, multiculturalism, gender and race in the context of postcolonial societies and further.