The Windrush scandal, the fallout of Brexit, the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston, the release of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology and Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, and the ascension of King Charles and Rishi Sunak have made it impossible to ignore the fissures and sutures in post-imperial Britain, demanding, instead, a long awaited postcolonial and anti-racist reckoning with the past and a reclamation of the future of Britain. To this end, our seminar will explore a range of cultural production that traces the histories of migration, the simultaneously inclusive and undecidable signifiers “Black” and “Asian” to denote and connote “the empire within,” the legacy of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, the significance of the publication of The Satanic Verses and the altered landscape of Muslim identity, key moments of “riot” and resistance following Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech, and recent culture wars reflecting the consolidation of “anti-woke” and anti-migrant sentiment. We will bear in mind that “British” is equally contested from within—Scottish, Irish, and Welsh do not necessarily belong comfortably within its confines. The aim of our seminar is to reconfigure the colonial and national archive by highlighting its silences and erasures and engaging systematically and imaginatively with its rich and complex content. The seminar will feature fiction, poetry, cinema/TV, theatre, music, and performance. Assignments that transgress boundaries between genres, mediums, and registers will be encouraged. Grading will be based on a selection from the following: discussion forum posts or reading responses, group seminar presentations or final colloquium, public-facing and/or creative writing, multi-media final project or research paper, final exam.
