HENKE1907U English - Free topic 7: The Postcolonial Middle Ages and The Postcolonial Present: Border-Crossings and the Figure of the Migrant

The Postcolonial Middle Ages (Henry Bainton)

The literary cultures of the “English” Middle Ages are deeply imprinted by the dynamics of conquest. The Insular experience of colonization—first by the Anglo-Saxons, then by the Danes and the Normans—involved cultural negotiation, assimilation, and resistance; and the literary texts written in this period were fraught with the anxieties that conquest generates. As well as introducing students to the history of this period, this module will engage postcolonial approaches to read those deeply anxious literary texts. We will consider, among other things, how the multilingual literary culture of medieval England contested and combined identities, how it negotiated expansionist military power, and how the crusades in the Holy Land provided a new framework through which to imagine others both at “home” and abroad.

The Postcolonial Present: Border-Crossings and the Figure of the Migrant (Anne Sophie Taagaard)

Who and what is a migrant? Is the migrant (only) someone who arrives in the West? Is the migrant inevitably non-white? How is the migrant received in the host society and what kind of anxiety does the migrant stir? How does migrant literature work to complexify our conceptions of the migrant and the migrant experience? Migration is far from a modern phenomenon. It has shaped, and continues to shape, the world that we live in. In this course we will explore the figure of the migrant through literature. We will, in particular, address the differences between being a migrant in Great Britain and the United States in an attempt to move beyond the ‘black and white’ nature of migrancy discourses.