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This course focuses on issues of cultural and individual identity that arise in literary texts that engage notions of Europe and its margins, or that center on tensions between the European North/South and East/West divides. We will examine texts that span a wide time range, from ancient to contemporary. Topics of interest include: “Orientalism” (idealized, distorted, and stereotyping representations of the “East” by Western writers); slavery in the Mediterranean world; imperialist struggles between West and East with reference to the Persian and Ottoman Empires; national identity and the question of Greece; religion, cultural identity, and Turkish guest workers in modern Germany; the European refugee crisis of the 21st century. We will work within an antiracist framework: analyzing, critiquing, and demystifying stereotypes, religious prejudice, and East-West cultural binaries.

This course will attempt to change the image of poetry and poets that comes to the mind of individuals trained in a traditional Western education system the moment they think of poetry. Depending on the students’ collective experiences/inexperiences with poetry, we will start the course with a discussion of how the tradition of “lyric poetry” is a modern construct of the U.S. classroom. Then we will move on to exploring poetry of color/nontraditional poetry within the U.S.A. and poetry in englishes (written in/translated to English) from around the world. The course’s emphasis will be on anti-oppressive, decolonial and postcolonial ways of engaging with poetry and poetics. From Audre Lorde to Claudia Rankine, Joy Harjo to Gabriela Mistral, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim to Bhanu Kapil, Rabindranath Tagore to Jalal-Ad-Din Rumi, we will take an enamoring tour of the world of poetry and poetics through this course.