The Migrant Writer
Module code: 903Q3
Dr Minoli Salgado (B225)
Spring 2015
Office Hour: TBC
'To write ... is to travel', according to Iain Chambers; the module will use this idea to
explore the displacement of the writing subject within the historical context of
postcolonial migration. The work of key migrant writers will be analysed in relation to
central concepts in literary and cultural criticism: hybridity and dialogical discourse, the
development of 'border languages', mimicry and the migrant subject, homelessness and
the creation of new cartographies, the politics of witnessing, and diasporic and nonoriginary histories. In the process the centrality of migration, exile and displacement to a
range of critical and theoretical approaches - including colonial discourse, postcolonial
theory, trauma theory and poststructuralist debates - will be addressed.
Module outline
Week One: Writing as Travel
Focus: general introduction to the course - a consideration of the effects of displacement
on constructions of identity, space and time, and on narrative form. The focus will be on
the critical and theoretical readings (see ‘key texts’ below) but the ideas will also be
explored in relation to a literary anchor, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Calvino’s novel
is a migrant (but not strictly speaking a postcolonial) text that draws together a number of
concerns central to the concept of ‘writing as travel’.
Literary anchor:
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
* Key texts
* Nigel Rapport and Andrew Dawson, Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a
World of Movement
* Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (Chapters 2 and 7)
* JD Culler ‘The Semiotics of Tourism’ in Framing the Sign: Criticism and its
Institutions
* John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism (Chapter 7: Diaspora Identities)
* Peter Middleton and Tim Woods, Literatures of Memory: History, time and space in
postwar writing (Intro. and Part 1)
* R. Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (Intro.)
B. Curtis and C. Pajaczkowska, ‘Getting there: travel, time and narrative’ in Travellers’
Tales ed. G. Robertson
Sunpreet Arshi et al, ‘Why travel?’ in Travellers’ Tales ed. G. Robertson
Elizabeth Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational
Time (Prologue and Part One)
S. Chubb, I, writer, I reader: the concept of self in the fiction of Italo Calvino
B. Weiss, Understanding Italo Calvino
Martin McLaughlin, Italo Calvino
Laurence A. Breiner, ‘Italo Calvino: The Place of the Emporer in Invisible Cities’,
Modern Fiction Studies, 34:4 (1988): 559-573
Week Two: The Past as a Foreign Country
Focus: ‘The past is a country from which we have all migrated … its loss is part of our
common humanity’ (Rushdie); migrant autobiography.
Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family
Secondary Reading
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (title chapter)
E. Soja, Postmodern Geographies (Chapters 1-3)
M. Keith and S. Pile eds., Place and the Politics of Identity (Chapters 1 and 2)
Madan Sarup, ‘Home and Identity’ in Travellers’ Tales ed. G. Roberston et al.
Paul John Eakin, How our lives become stories (Chapter 2)
James Olney ed. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical
Liz Stanley, The Auto/biographical I
P.J. Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention
G.T. Couser and J. Fichtelberg, eds., True Relations, Essays on Autobiography and the
Postmodern
Minoli Salgado, ‘The New Cartographies of Re-Orientalism’, (on RIF) Journal of
Commonwealth Literature, 46:2 (2011) 199-218
Marta Bladek, ‘The Place One Had Been Years Ago’: Mapping the Past in Michael
Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, Life Writing, 9:4 (2012) 391-406
John Thieme, '"Historical Relations"' (on RIF) in Narrative Strategies in Canadian
Literature ed. Coral Ann Howells
Sonia Snelling, 'A Human Pyramid' (on RIF), Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 32:1
(1997)
B. Curtis and C. Pajaczkowska, ‘Getting there: travel, time and narrative’ in Travellers’
Tales ed. G. Robertson
Sunpreet Arshi et al, ‘Why travel?’ in Travellers’ Tales ed. G. Robertson
Daniel Coleman, Masculine Migrations: Reading the Postcolonial Novel in New
Canadian Narratives (chapter on MO)
Doreen Massey, ‘A Place Called Home’, New Formations, 17, summer 1992
Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins
Week Three: Points of Departure
Focus: displacement, agency and migration; reading history through migrant subjectivity.
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Secondary Reading
Roger Bromley, Narratives for a New Belonging (Chapters 1 and 2 for MHK)
Laura E. Skandera-Trombley, Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston
Margit Wogowitsch, Narrative Strategies and Multicultural Identity: Maxine Hong
Kingston in Context
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Section on The Woman Warrior)
Stuart Hall, 'Cultural Identity and Diaspora' in P. Williams and L. Chrisman, eds,
Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory
Stephen Clingman, The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of
the Boundary
Week Four: Hybridity and Border Languages
Focus: hybridized discourse and creolization, linguistic innovation and the migrant
writer, ‘changing the language changes the context’ – language as political intervention.
Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners
Secondary Reading
Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’ in The Dialogic Imagination ed. M. Holquist
M. Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World
Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (chapter 1:
sections on Bakhtin)
Robert Young, ‘Deconstruction and the Postcolonial’ in Deconstruction: A User’s Guide
P. Childs and P. Williams, 'Bhabha's Hybridity', in Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory
Iain Chambers, Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity
Susheila Nasta, ed., Critical Perspectives on Samuel Selvon
Kathleen Balutansky and M-A Souireau, eds, Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the
Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature and Identity
Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/colonial Literature
Week Five: Mimicry and the Migrant Subject
Focus: duality and split subjectivity, ‘mimicry as menace’, the palimpsest.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Secondary Reading
Homi Bhabha, ‘Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse’, ‘The other
question’ ‘Sly civility’, ‘DessemiNation: Time, narrative and the margins of the modern
nation’, and ‘How newness enters the world: Postmodern space, postcolonial times and
the trials of cultural translation’ in The Location of Culture
David Smale, ed, Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children/ The Satanic Verses, Chapters 4
&6
Ulrike Erichsen, ‘A “True-True” Voice? The problem of authenticity’ in Being/s in
Transit ed. Liselotte Glage
Dean MacConnell, ‘Staged Authenticity’, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure
Class
John Frow, ‘Intertextuality and Ontology’ in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices ed.
Michael Worton and Judith Still
Vijay Mishra, 'Postcolonial Difference: Diasporic Narratives of Salman Rushdie', Ariel,
26:3, 1995
R. D. Ashmore, Self and Identity, Chapter 3 - on the postmodern self
Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line, Part IV
Essays by Philip Engblom, Peter Jones, Sara Suleri, M. Keith Booker and S. Aravamudan
in Reading Rushdie ed M. D. Fletcher
Minoli Salgado, ‘Migration and Mutability: The Twice Born Fiction of Salman Rushdie’
in British Culture of the Postwar eds. Alistair Davies and Alan Sinfield
Week Six: RESEARCH WEEK
Week Seven: Bearing Witness
Focus: political exile, testimony and trauma; ‘Outsider! Trespasser! You have no right to
this subject!’ (Salman Rushdie, Shame)
Ariel Dorfman, Widows (1983; the novel) trans. S. Kessler
Secondary Reading
Sophia McClennan, Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope
Judith Butler, Precarious Life
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis and History (Essential reading)
Patricia Linton, ‘Ethical Reading and Resistant Texts’ in Postcolonial Literatures:
Expanding the Canon ed. D.L Madsen
Doris Sommer, ‘Resistant Texts and Incompetent Readers’, Poetics Today, 15:4 (March
1993) pp.141-153
Doris Sommer, ‘Textual Conquests: On readerly competence and ‘minority’ literature’,
Modern Language Quarterly, 54:1 (1994), pp.523-551
Week Eight: Ambivalent Authority
Focus: displacement and narrative authority, writing the nation and migration.
Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost
Optional additional text: Minoli Salgado, A Little Dust on the Eyes
Secondary Reading
Maya Jaggi, Interview with Michael Ondaatje in Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary
Writers Talk ed. Susheila Nasta (also in Wasafiri, 32, Autumn 2000)
Michael Ondaatje, ‘Pale Flags’ (on writing Anil’s Ghost), Wasafiri, Summer 2004
Milena Marinkova, ‘Perceiving in One’s Own Body: The Violence of History, Politics
and Writing – Anil’s Ghost and Witness Writing’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature
(2009), 45
W. Knepper, ‘Confessions, Autopsy and the Postcolonial Postmortems of Michael
Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost’ in C. Matzeke and S Muhleisen (ed) Postcolonial Postmortems:
Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective (Rodopi, 2006) pp.35-57.
Minoli Salgado, ‘Vanishing Points/Visible Fictions: The Textual Politics of Terror’,
Textual Practice, 27: 2 (2013), pp.207-233.
Marlene Goldman, ‘Representations of Buddhism in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost’,
http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb04-03/goldman04.html
C. Kanaganayakam, In Defense of Anil’s Ghost, Ariel, 37:1, 5-26 (on political readings
of AG)
R. Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Belonging (Chapter 6 –
comments on Gordimer can be used to critique Ondaatje)
Homi Bhabha, ‘The postcolonial and the postmodern: the question of agency’, The
Location of Culture
Week Nine: Bearing Witness II
Focus on: silence, trauma and mourning; critiquing the West.
Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love
Secondary Reading
Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds
Zoe Norridge, Perceiving Pain in African Literature
Sam Durrant, Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning
Week Ten: Travel Writing and Nomadism
Focus on: identity, time, place, narrative in relation to nomadism; counter-travel writing
Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia
Secondary Reading
Patrick Meanor, Bruce Chatwin
Andrew Palmer, Bruce Chatwin: a critical study
Debbie Lisk, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing
Peter Hulme, ‘Travelling to Write’ in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing eds.
P. Hulme and T. Youngs
Jonathan Chatwin, Bruce Chatwin
Carl Thompson, Travel Writing (Chapter 4: Reporting the World and Chapter 6:
Representing the Other)
J. Cowley, ‘Pataphysical Patagonia: Bruce Chatwin’s Distantly Interrogative
Somewhere’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 37:4 (1996) 301-312
G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine
Week Eleven: Critical Approaches, Term Paper Plan and Review
Week Twelve: Office Hours and Supervision