Our global world is characterised by conflicts and contaminations that find their roots and explanation in past colonial relations. Urgent questions generated by an uneven postcolonial society relate to issues such as borders, memory, identity, ethnicity, migration and representation of otherness. The minor in postcolonial studies places these critical issues in a historical and theoretical framework.
Students who take this minor can choose from a variety of regularly scheduled courses offered by several departments and can acquire the principles and methodological insights afforded by postcolonial theory to analyse Western and non-Western literatures, cinema, visual and popular culture at large.
Students learn to recognise how issues of representation, discourse, power, gender, ethnicity, and geo-politics are structured within colonial dichotomies of whiteness/blackness, East/West, tradition/modernity and critically analyse their transitions in different postcolonial societies and cultures.
Major goals of the minor in postcolonial studies are:
- Acquire an overview of the major currents and approaches in postcolonial theories.
- Study Europe’s internal forms of colonial/postcolonial relations
- Learn to apply postcolonialism analytical tools at cultural, social and textual level
- Develop skills in order to carry out research using comparative methodological instruments