SHUM 6009

What Is a Settler Text?

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2022-2023.

Though Indigenous literature or, more accurately, literatures are growing both in their production and criticism, we have yet to address the question of settler discourse and writings. Can we conceptualize a literary settler colonialism? What is a settler text? And what are the literary aspects and politics that bind this genre? This course approaches this question comparatively, looking into the United States and Israel as active settler colonialisms, and analyzes American nationalism, Zionism (as a European nationalist movement), and their overlap in American Zionist writings. The course begins with critical scholarship in the fields of American Indian and Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and Palestine studies, then moves into literary texts, canonical and lesser known, that we will read and hypothesize as settler texts.

When Offered Spring.

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