This MULOSIGE syllabus has been compiled by Dr Sara Marzagora, Dr Itzea Goikolea Amiano, Jack Clift, Ayele Kebede (SOAS, MULOSIGE), Poonkulaly Gunaseelan (SOAS), Ruixian Li (SOAS) and Dr Nora Parr (postdoctoral research fellow, SOAS). The course is entitled ‘Multilingual perspectives on gender in world literature’. Follow the link below to download the course.

Course Description

In her “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”, Joan Scott (1986) called for a constant interrogation of historical gender relations and identities, as well as of particular gender symbolic invocations (which, how, in what context, and by whom these were made). Following this insight, this course aims at exploring gender representations, themes and debates in the multilingual literatures of India, the Horn of Africa, and the Arab world. Gender, as a primary socio-cultural category, in relation to class, religion, sexuality, and race, is critical in shaping many aspects related to world literature and its study. World literature has not fully explored the gendered nature of canon formation, literary historiographies, and translation practices. Access to education, free time, and financial resources has often been more restricted for women, and that has influenced in the way in which women and men could participate in literature as writers, readers, translators, critics – even as characters. Besides, as certain genres were more contingent on education than others, genre and gender could be conceived as connected. Thus, considering female authors may influence well-established notions of literary history and literary networks, and it can feminise the still overwhelmingly male canon of world literature. Yet gender does not only affect women, despite the widespread tendency to approach male authors and characters as if they were a-gendered. For that reason, the course pays attention to notions of masculinity, and how they played out in different types of literary works. What are the understandings of what it means to be and act as a man or a woman in the literary traditions of these regions of the Global South – or are gender binaries not present, or irrelevant? And what significant geographies can we trace in the literatures that discuss or represent gender, both in the local and the translocal realm? What are the new perspectives on gender that emerge when we take multilingualism as our main analytical framework?

This syllabus developed out of the one-day workshop “Comparative perspectives on gender in the (post)colonial literatures of North India, the Horn of Africa, and the Arab world” (SOAS, 20 March 2018) organised by Dr Itzea Goikolea Amiano.

Download the course here: Multilingual perspectives on gender in world literature.