Programs and Areas

The English Department at Ohio State University has a number of faculty who research, write, and teach in the area of postcolonial literature and theory. The faculty bring a broad array of approaches to the study of narrative fictions (film, literature, comic books, for instance) and poetic and artistic practices that have emerged from geographic, epistemological, and ontological spaces colonized by the West. Several such approaches include, but are not limited to, analyses of hybrid discursive resistances of (neo)colonial hegemonies, orientalist textual containments, politically and culturally forced migrations, and comparative transethnic cultures. Refiguring centers and margins while tracing new dialogic textual encounters, the work in this field critically engages with nativist/subaltern epistemologies, world literary genres, storytelling modes, narrative techniques, and subaltern creative expressions of materialist conditions of exploitation and oppression. The faculty keep centrally in mind the site-specific grids of history, politics, and culture that uniquely inflect postcolonial narratives and art in their contexts of production and reception, focusing on such as areas of the world as Africa, Australia, Hawai'i, Latin America, New Zealand, Oceania, the Philippines, and South Asia.

581: Special Topics in U.S. Ethnic Literature and Culture (periodically taught with a focus on the intersections between ethnic and postcolonial studies)
583: Special Topics in World Literature in English (periodically taught with a focus on the intersections between world anglophone literature and postcolonial studies)
760: Introduction to Postcolonial Literature and Theory
864: Seminar in Postcolonial/Transnational Literatures

Adeleke Adeeko, Professor
Frederick Aldama, Professor
Chadwick Allen, Associate Professor
Pranav Jani, Assistant Professor
Martin Joseph Ponce, Assistant Professor