This course was taught at Danville Correctional Center through the Education Justice Project (EJP). Assignment prompts were developed collaboratively in class, which is why they do not appear below; basic instructions can be found in the syllabus. It was also “ungraded,” meaning we used extensive feedback and a contract, instead of grades, to respond to student work.
To consider relationships between indigeneity and race, this class will ask you to think with emergent relationships within and across borders in the wake of settler colonialism in North America and the Pacific. We will consider the Pacific as a sea of islands and peoples connected through complex histories of navigation and trade, as well as ongoing neocolonial and diasporic relationships with the US. These relationships have been shaped by the racialization and romanticization of Indigenous peoples and lands – and we will consider those contexts at length– but they are also shaped by the relationships between Indigenous communities, and we will try to center those in our discussions. Ultimately, this class will aim to view world literature less as a canon of Western and Western-influenced texts and more as an unbounded collection of texts shaped by relationships to specific places, as well as the routes between them.
Each of the novels and poetry collections we will read in this class focuses on a different settler-colonial space and Indigenous women’s ongoing relationships to that space. Questioning borders, building frameworks for relationality, and contending with the traumas of dispossession, they invite us to imagine alternatives to (post)colonial social and political landscapes. We will move between North America and the Pacific, thinking with different regional ways of knowing and questioning what it means to move between these two spaces, intertwined by settler colonialism and the aftermaths of World War II. In addition, we will read a series of transnational feminist critical frameworks. They will provide foundations and models for us to develop our own strategies for analyzing the negotiated and contested narratives about race, gender, and sexuality that the texts evidence in order to form interpretive arguments that address the ways in which the texts unsettle ideas about the nation, nation building, and national belonging.
Erin Cheslow 