This graduate seminar investigates the complex yet interlocking ideas of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Our goal in reading these three famous scholars--whose names, tellingly, appear together in an entry entitled “The Holy Trinity” in Postcolonial Studies: The Essential Glossary--is not to view them as simply “standing in” for the many and varied contributions to postcolonial thought. Our goal is instead to view their writings and the sometimes heated responses they have generated as a series of perspectives from which we identify and then explore some key concerns in postcolonial studies.

To pursue this goal, we’ll begin with an overview of the key term "representation." We’ll then read theoretical writings by Said, Bhabha, and Spivak; critical responses to their ideas; and selected cultural texts including a video by Richard Fung, visual art by Dinh Q. Le, and a work of creative non-fiction by Dionne Brand. Our investigation will be organized around three topics: orientalism, the location of culture, and deconstructing historiography. As we work through these topics, we’ll ask ourselves: how can these ideas enable us to better understand what Stuart Hall calls “the work of representation” in postcolonial studies?

This seminar welcomes interdisciplinary exchange among graduate students working in the humanities and social sciences. Students in this course will be expected to read widely across interdisciplinary debates and to write regularly about the texts listed in the schedule below. Students will also have a chance to learn about some of the key library resources in postcolonial studies held here at NTU and elsewhere in Taiwan.