Summer Reading Group

The following are the reading lists for previously held summer reading groups.

SUMMER 2009

June
Cheah, Pheng. Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

July
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York & London: Routledge, 1994.

August
Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

SUMMER 2008

June
Hardt and Negri; Empireand Multitude

July
Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

August
Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

SUMMER 2007
Reading List (pdf)

Past Events: 2008 and before

Some of our past events include:

Gayatri Spivak in conversation with Peter Hitchcock about Other Asias (Spring 08).

“Writing Across Borders” Asian Women Writers, with Meena AlexanderJessica Hagedorn, and Kimiko Hahn, English, Queens College/CUNY (Spring 08).

Waf’a Abdellatif Zeinal’Abidin, English, University of Mosul, Iraq and the Radcliffe Institute (Spring 08).

Michele Grossman on aboriginal women’s writing in Australia (Spring 07).

Sukhdev Sandhu of NYU spoke about his work in progress on underground London.

Ashley Dawson on South Asian Youth Cultures in Britain after 9/11.

Sachidananda Mohanty lecture: “Empire, Education, and Community Building: Early Women’s Writing in India, 1898—1950.”

David Eng (Rutgers) spoke on transnational adoptions.

Peter Hitchcock spoke on “Postcolonial Genres.”

 

Poetry Event: Kishwar Naheed and Meena Alexander

Tuzyline Jita Allan spoke on “Lindsay Collen: Postcolonial Considerations.

Screening of Hanif Kureishi’s film “My Son the Fanatic,” followed by a discussion moderated by Peter Hitchcock.

Black British Film Evening screening and discussion of Sankofa’s “Passion of Remembrance.”

USA premiere of Cameroonian feature film Potent Secrets, starring (and written by) English program student Joyce Abunaw.

Shakuntala Bharvani, a Visiting Fulbright Lecturer from the University of Mumbai gave a talk entitled “Bombay to Mumbai: Mapping the City’s Myriad Voices.”

“A Transnational Mushaira”: an evening of international poetry, featuring Meena Alexander and other poets.

Discussion with Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, editors of The Edward Said Reader.

An African/(-American) Women and Literature Panel: Visiting Scholar Margie Orford of the Comp. Lit. Dept. on Namibian Women Writers and the Women Writing Africa Project, and Denise Rodriguez from the English Dept. on Tony Morrison.

Nicole Rizzuto This Friday

The CUNY Graduate Center Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series 2010-2011
 
Nicole Rizzuto
Oklahoma State University
 
Confession and the Juridical Crisis of the Colonial State in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat
 
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1967) circles around the Emergency in Kenya, a traumatic historical event of anticolonial insurgency and counter-insurgency. In detailing this period of indefinite detention and torture undertaken in the name of a benevolent civilizing mission, the novel states that the struggle over two specific losses suffered under British colonialism are at the heart of the Emergency. Those losses are land and freedom.  And yet, the work’s formal strategies simultaneously challenge this direct statement by indirectly constituting the Emergency as an event whose losses exceed that of territory and control of the polity; the Emergency is staged also as a crisis of the juridico-legal order by which the category “human” becomes the contested site of, and justification for, exceptional state violence. Placing Ngữgi’s writing in conversation with Judith Butler’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theorizations of sovereignty and bare life in modernity reveals how the novel might displace a Euro-centered trajectory in Trauma Studies.  By elaborating a state of exception in Africa under colonial rule, A Grain of Wheat both calls for and enacts what Michael Rothberg terms “multi-directional memory,” by which the insights of Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies illuminate each other while addressing the ethico-politics of responding to occluded pasts.
 
April 1st at 2 p.m.
CUNY Graduate Center, Room 5409
 
All are welcome
 
Nicole Rizzuto is Assistant Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. She has published on issues of testimony and trauma in journals such as World Picture and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and is completing a book manuscript entitled Spectral Witnesses: Testimony, Historical Memory, and the Modern Novel.
 
The CUNY Graduate Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016.
The Postcolonial Studies Group is a chartered organization of the Doctoral Students’ Council. Please visit our website at www.opencuny.org/psg. Questions? Email Lily Saint at lsaint@gc.cuny.edu