HENK0386MU English - Free topic 15: Cultural Encounters in Local and Global Contexts: Engagement Across Borders (exam form A + B)

In this course we will look at a selection of literary texts and their representation of the issues at stake when non-Western cultures come into contact with the West across a colonial, postcolonial, or global divide that invariably generates instability and hybridity. The typical result is estrangement and loss, but this ‘predicament’ may also lead to new insights, empowerment, circumvention, or what the theorist Homi Bhabha has called a ‘superior cultural intelligence’. The course is divided into three parts in which we will first study historical, then, contemporary, and, finally, futuristic encounters between Western cultural agents and those of (formerly) colonised territories.