Seminar Globalisation and Transcultural Justice in Anglophone Literatures Mo 12.30

In this seminar we will explore literary negotiations of globalisation and transcultural justice in contemporary Anglophone literatures. Over the last decades, debates about globalisation and transcultural justice have played an increasingly prominent role in Anglophone literatures and postcolonial and global studies. Writers from Zadie Smith to J.M. Coetzee employ the novel to imaginatively negotiate both the possibilities and challenges of enacting justice in our globalised modernity. In the seminar we will elaborate the key terms of globalisation, transculturality and justice. We will also examine how literary imaginations take these concepts up and on and how they enforce new concepts of justice. Which role do aesthetic forms play in these processes and how can we conceive the interplay between aesthetics and politics? Close analyses of novels by Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun) and Andrea Levy (The Long Song) will reveal how these texts engage with the inequalities, epistemic violence and power structures produced by the continuing impact of neo-colonial structures. We will examine how these novels create new concepts of transcultural justice, especially for the Global South, and discuss how the novels bear on our understanding of politics in our planetary modernity. Introductory Reading: Anker, Elizabeth S. Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature. Ithaka: Cornell University Press, 2012. Bewes, Timothy. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Marsden, Peter H., and Geoffrey V.Davis. Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Human Rights in a Post-Colonial World. New York: Rodopi, 2004. Oboe, Annalisa, and Shaul Bassi. Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures. New York: Routledge, 2011. Olson, Greta. -‘Like a Dog’: Rituals of Animal Degradation in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Abu Ghraib Prison.” Journal of Narrative Theory 44.1 (Spring 2014): 116-156. Swanson Goldberg, Elizabeth. Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature. New York: Routledge, 2012. Anglistik V - Anglophone Literaturen/Literaturübersetzen Universität Düsseldorf SoSe 2016 Univ.-Prof. Dr. Neumann Birgit