This graduate seminar asks: what is at stake in representing "transitions" in postcolonial contexts? Alongside legal and political initiatives, how are writers, filmmakers, and scholars engaged with this problem? Why should we care about such issues, here and now?

This seminar engages with such questions with a focus on accounts of transition and debates over transitional justice as they have taken shape in various postcolonial sites. In this seminar, we will approach transitional justice as an uneven, contested, and ongoing process that is not bounded by legal and political initiatives alone. We will carefully review scholarly debates with a focus on state technologies including truth commissions and museums. We will then turn to specific interlinked sites to investigate in more detail: Canada/Japan, South Africa, and Taiwan/the US. In our examinations of these specific sites, we will discuss a mix of critical and cultural texts (including a film, a play, and two novels) with a view to helping students to develop their responses to these materials.

This seminar welcomes students who have previously studied postcolonial issues as well as students who are approaching postcolonial texts for the first time. Please note that students in this seminar will be expected to read widely across interdisciplinary debates, to reflect upon previously held commonsense ideas, and to write regularly about the texts listed in the schedule below. As the issues under investigation in this seminar are still unfolding, we may add additional relevant reading materials as they become available.