User:Dr. Van's Labyrinth/sandbox

Link to front page of your volume: Themes in Literature/Belonging and Exile

Dr Van's Labyrinth

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Welcome to the labyrinth for our post-colonial literature class at LaGuardia Community College, Fall 2022.'''

'''We are calling this volume: Post-Colonial Investigations: J.M. Coetzee and Others. In this course we read and discussed the works of ten different post-colonial writers.'''

'''We began in Australia with an important film about the treatment of Aborigine half-caste children in the early years of the twentieth century. Then we traveled to Haiti to discuss the work of Edwidge Danticat and we learned a great deal about Haitian history (and its current situation) from a series of New York Times articles published in 2022. South Africa was our next destination, for a deep dive into the experience of apartheid (1947-1994). To understand the racial divide, we read a selection from Trevor Noah's Born a Crime.  in-depth study of J.M. Coetzee’s powerful novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, in which ethical dilemmas of individuals in positions of power are exposed and dissected. Coetzee tells us that the novel is about “the impact of the torture chamber on the life of a man of conscience” (“Into the Dark Chamber”). For our final unit, we reflected on ways a kind of “apartheid” persists in the context of gender and social class. We focused on female short story writers including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Bessie Head, Jumpha Lahiri, and Alice Munro. These selections offered intriguing examples of the ways gender codes are their own form of “colonialism.” The noted Coetzee scholar, David Attwell, explains this connection: “The desired, female colonized is well known as a trope of colonial discourse, whether she represents the interior and its material riches, the landscape, or the purely psychic abundance of the unknown.”'''

'''The essays in this Wikibook are the results of student research on these authors. Welcome to our page and feel free to intereact:)'''

Our readings:

"Children of the Sea" and "1937" by Edwidge Danticat

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee

"Life" by Bessie Head

"The Thing Around Your Neck" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri

"Boys and Girls" by Alice Munro

"Everyday Use" by Alice Walker