Kaufmann Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall
Free and open to the public
Simon Gikandi (Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University)
ON MODERNISM AND EARLY POSTCOLONIAL STYLE
In this lecture, Gikandi will argue that the assumed opposition between the ideologies of modernism and postcolonial theory detract us from a more substantive engagement with the question of colonial modernity, or of late colonialism, as a theoretical problem. Gikandi will argue that if postcolonial literature and modernism seem to exist in a state of uneasiness or instability, it is because of a series of misunderstandings which emerge out of our inability to engage with literary history and periodization. If modernism was the quintessential style of colonialism, why did it seem to be at odds with the aspirations of postcolonial writers? Was there a postcolonial literature before postcolonial theory? And how did colonized writers in the crucial period between late colonialism and decolonization negotiate their own troubled relationship to inherited genres, languages, and traditions?
MARCH 16, 2010
Time: 10:00 am
Location: Toboggan Lodge
In addition to Gikandi's lecture, he will conduct a seminar on the topic“Between Roots and Routes: Cosmopolitanism and the Claims of Locality”
The suggested reading for Gikandi's seminar is "Between Roots and Routes." To download a PDF copy of the text click here.
Simon Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of many books and articles including Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, which was a Choice Outstanding Academic Publication for 2004. He is the co-editor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literatureand the editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of African Literature. His new book, The Aura of Blackness: Slavery and the Culture of Taste is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.
