Literature of Emerging Nations: Race, Police, Empire

The emergence of nationalist thought developed in the nineteenth century alongside new discourses of race and new apparatuses of social control. How did these problems come to be linked? In what ways does culture- such as literature and film- shape our thinking about race and policing, and in what ways is it shaped by these developments? What role does policiing have in the perpetuation and exacerbation of racial inequalities and race-thought within the nation-state? This course will examine fiction and films produced by artists from Indonesia, the Philippines, Senegal, Nigeria, South Africa, and the United States of America. The readings and films for this course will focus on how national, racial and gender identities shape and are shaped by culture, police, and empire from the end of the nineteenth century to the postWorld War II world.