This course introduces students to postcolonial literatures and theories. Reading essays, novels, short stories, and autobiography, we will explore the relationships between colonialism, nationalism, language, and gender. If colonialism is a system of power involving the subjugation of economic, political, cultural, and artistic self-determination, then postcolonial critics ask what circumstances and means are necessary to escape the colonial situation. What, furthermore, are the conditions of cultural production in the postcolonial present? Through an engagement with texts from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, we will try to make this shift ourselves by considering how colonial and postcolonial writers theorize their own conditions of oppression and potentials for emancipation. How do writers seek to decolonize the imagination? What possibilities does language hold for fashioning postcolonial futures?