Examine how gender and sexuality are connected to colonial oppression in any two texts from the module.

Contemporary Literature, Postcolonial Fictions Essay Questions

This is a 2500-word essay and is worth 100% of the total mark for this module.
It should be submitted by 4pm on Monday 10th January 2022.
Answer ONE question. All answers must refer to AT LEAST TWO texts on the module. You must use at least TWO postcolonial theorists in your essay.
Remember:
▪ To construct a coherent argument that answers the selected question and provides evidence from the primary texts and other critical and theoretical sources where necessary.
▪ To present your work according to guidelines.

Essay Questions:

1. Explore how hierarchies of race and ethnicity are linked to colonialism and postcoloniality in any two texts from the module.

2. Examine how the legacies of colonialism and its histories of oppression continue to shape the postcolonial present in any two texts from the module.

3. Walter Mignolo writes: ‘Decoloniality means first to delink (to detach) from that overall structure of knowledge in order to engage in an epistemic reconstitution. Reconstitution of what? Of ways of thinking,languages, ways of life and being in the world that the rhetoric of modernity disavowed and the logic of coloniality implement’.
With a focus on ‘ways of thinking, languages, ways of life and being in the world’, examine how any two texts from the module contest the logic of coloniality.

4. Examine how gender and sexuality are connected to colonial oppression in any two texts from the module.

5. Sami Schalk argues that authors who innovate with genre and form may ‘change the rules of reality in their texts to contest oppressive systems of thought and behavior’.
Analyse how innovation in genre and form might contest colonial systems of oppression in any two texts from the module.

6. Analyse how any two texts from the module use language to articulate new and less unequal visions of the future.

NB: These questions are subject to approval by external examiners.