COLONIALISM, IMPERIALISM, AND SEXUALITY

This course considers the abundance of European literature and travel writing that detail the encounter between the colonizer and colonized. These narratives deploy stereotypes to characterize non-European geographies and people as excessively sensual and cast outside the progressive flow of time, waiting to be discovered by the white traveler. Edward Said termed this projected fantasy of sexual decadence “Orientalism,” or the cultural/historical reduction of “the East” into a stockpile of recognizable tropes. This reduction serves an ideological goal: to portray the North/West as the intellectual/cultural elite, and the South/East as the mere object of the former’s cataloguing fetish. This First-Year Writing course interrogates canonical texts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European literature and travel writing by formulating questions about the erotic dimension of empires, with Said’s critical intervention as our guide. How is sexuality configured in colonial writing? What do these configurations tell us about the ideological map superimposed over the colony and the metropole? How do these constructions of sexuality continue to proliferate in our contemporary moment, and for what political ends?