E 142 Reading Without Borders

Overview of Course

In this course, we will analyze cultural and intellectual exchanges that have taken place from the 18th century to the present with a focus on cross-cultural intellectual, emotional, and economic exchanges that underwrote Western colonial aspirations during the 18th and 19th centuries (and to the present). To help us on our journey to give voice to these experiences, we will turn to Edward Said and his writing on Orientalism – a way of perceiving (and misperceiving) the non-Western “other – that he theorized in his seminal and controversial 1978 book, Orientalism. The ways in which the “other” was constructed in Western imagination took on particular significance during the period of European exploration, expansion and colonization in the East. The racism and anti-Semitism that underwrote these characterizations further presented a view of the East that combined fact and fantasy, admiration and revulsion, and a complex web of ideas often serving darker political motives rooted in the notion of Western superiority. We will study the production and reception of literary and cultural texts within the context of transformation of identities and a reconceptualization of space and time. Our readings this semester will take us into broader themes such as immigration, human rights, exile, home, terrorism and global feminisms and spanning fiction, non-fiction, film and popular culture. We will study colonial narratives which imagine the “East” and counternarratives that rebut the stereotypes that represent Eastern Others as inferior. Texts include: novels, poetry, short stories, film, and perhaps music.