Winter 2014

ENG 616: Literatures of Settlement - South Africa and Australia

Brian Deyo

This course is a seminar in Postcolonial Literature and Theory. We will focus primarily on postcolonial texts that attempt to imaginatively rewrite and reconstruct colonial encounters between European settlers and the indigenous peoples of South Africa and Australia during the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century. We will also focus on texts that, while set in the twentieth century, emphasize the continuities between colonial and postcolonial histories. Given the similarities between the encounters that took place in these regions, coupled with the close affinities between their respective environments and ecologies, the pairing of South Africa and Australia offers an unusually rich basis for comparative analysis. Furthermore, the stark differences between the two regions and Europe posed significant challenges to settlers. We will focus on literature that dramatizes the struggle of settlers to adapt to new, formidable environments and recreate European social, political, economic and cultural institutions.

As we will see, the literature of settlement analyzes the unique difficulties that attend the process of orienting the self with respect to novelty, foreignness, and difference. For the historical phenomenon of settler colonialism was a profoundly ‘unsettling’ experience, both for Europeans and indigenous peoples. The colonial encounter unsettles European identity, along with notions of race, sexuality, gender and class, even the conceptual category of civilization itself. Thus we will analyze the creative process through which twentieth century South African and Australian writers attempt to imagine and come to grips with the histories of their ancestors, not to mention the legacies of settler colonialism as they are thought to impinge upon the contemporary, postcolonial moment.