History, Narrative, Literature: The Case of Modern South Asia

Graduate seminar exploring the relationship between history and narration in modern South Asia

Instructor: Nisarg Patel

Term: TBA

Location: TBA

Time: TBA

Course Description

This graduate seminar examines the relationship between history and narration in modern South Asia, exploring how literary and theoretical texts shape our understanding of the past, present, and future. Through interdisciplinary inquiry, the course investigates key debates on colonialism, memory, caste, subalternity, violence, and the archive, treating literature as a form of historical knowledge and history as an ongoing field of narrative contestation.

Syllabus

Full Syllabus

Weekly Topics

  1. History and Narrative: An Introduction
  2. Colonization and the Question of Writing
  3. Writing History and Forming Discourse
  4. Imagining the Other: Empire, Knowledge, and Representation
  5. Other Histories: Modernity, Historicism, and the Past
  6. History and Subjectivity: Nation, Gender, and the Subaltern
  7. Caste, Experience, and the Making of the Subject
  8. Archives, Memory, and the Afterlives of Partition
  9. After Empire: Postcolonial Histories and Theoretical Transitions
  10. Rewriting History and Reimagining Narrative
  11. History of Violence, Violence of History
  12. The End(s) of History and Narrative
  13. The Future(s) of History: Planetary Worlds and New Narratives