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Course description:
Read powerful feminist and anti-caste literatures this quarter. This course will explore South Asia and its diasporas via poetry and literary texts that foreground questions of gender, caste and social equality. We will read anti-caste and feminist texts to examine how writers from the margins have negotiated questions of literary writing, genre and tradition. How do these writers imagine new worlds and radical forms of equality? What ideas of the poetic do they produce? What can we extrapolate from these texts for larger conversations about poetry and politics? These will be our guiding questions.
We will place the poetry we read alongside texts in a variety of genres (novel, literary criticism and manifestos). The intersecting but varied foci in the course are designed to help you develop the skills to work with and write about the relationship between form and politics. Readings include South Asian feminist literature (Volga, Fahmida Riaz), Dalit feminist literature (Sukirtharani, Bama) and diasporic feminist and Coolitude poetry (Tarfia Faizullah, Khal Torabully).
Career Readiness: Employers have identified eight Career Readiness CompetenciesLinks to an external site. they view as essential for student success in internships and post-graduation roles. This course will help you develop the following essential competencies: communication, critical thinking and equity and inclusion. Learn more about gaining and articulating your skills by visiting the Build Career Readiness Competencies page on the UW Career & Internship Center website.
Course goals:
This course will enable you to:
- Understand, evaluate and use the following key concepts: imagination, caste, gender, Dalit and Coolitude.
- Develop basic knowledge of modern South Asia and the ability to contextualize South Asian writing and literature.
- Understand, evaluate and use social categories to study literary texts and non-literary writing.
- Develop analytical and writing skills that can be used outside academic contexts.
- Analyze and work with diverse texts, including academic essays, non-academic narratives and literary texts.
- Identify 3 Career Readiness Competenciesyou developed in this course.