Instructor: A. Fishzon
Violent upheavals of the twentieth century – imperialism, the two world wars, strugglesfor national independence, decolonization, and the Cold War — have made exile anddislocation the great preoccupations of literary works, autobiography, and theoreticalwritings. Globalization, driven by unprecedented trade and new technologies ofcommunication, information, and travel, has accelerated the movement of people,commodities, ideas, and cultures across the world. Diaspora is thus treated here not as asingular but rather historically varied and heterogeneous phenomenon. The transnationalmobility of people may be the result of forced or voluntary migration, self-exile orexpulsion. Refugees, people in transit, are the product of war, ideological heterodoxyand persecution, ethnic conflict, and natural calamity.
Under the broad rubrics of ‘diaspora’, ‘exile’ and ‘displacement’ we will move throughthe course thematically, taking a cross-cultural and cross-temporal approach and coveringthe following topics: nostalgia and homelessness, the ideologies of ‘home’ and nation,immigrant and diasporic cultures, experiences and memory of war, genocide, the politicsof multiculturalism, the predicament of minorities, the exilic perspective, the redefinitionof cosmopolitanism, identity questions (belonging, ‘national origins’, assimilation,acculturation), issues relating to race (racism), sexuality and gender, as well as borders,‘mixing’, and language.
Novels, essays, poems, and films produced in various geographic and historical contextshave engaged creatively with the phenomenological and material aspects of migration,dislocation, and privation. Psychoanalysis has focused on loss, mourning, anxiety, andshame – repetitions as well as impossibilities of return. Postcolonial theory and culturalstudies have had a particular interest in conceptualizing the ‘new’ phenomena of bordersand borderlands, hybridity, language (for example, global English), translation, doubleconsciousness, history and its lack; and all of the above-mentioned theories, narratives,and imaginings have addressed the affective dimensions of migration and diaspora –homesickness, memory, longing, and melancholy.
Diaspora and immigration are multidisciplinary fields. In addition to fictional accounts,we will draw on writings in anthropology, psychoanalysis, poststructuralist theory,history, literary studies, and cultural studies. Theorists to be studied will include:
Sigmund Freud, Edward Said, Svetlana Boym, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Rey Chow,Theodore Adorno, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. We will watch films and readnovels, memoirs, poems, and other literary by writers such as: Joseph Brodsky, MilanKundera, Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, Anzia Yezierska, and Vladimir Nabokov,Salman Rushdie, Frantz Fanon, V.S. Naipaul, and Gloria Anzaldua.
