Postcolonial Europe

This MA course aims at establishing the state of the art of postcolonial studies in Europe from a gender, ethnic and transnational perspective. This will connect and contextualise issues related to differentiated colonial histories within Europe (historical, linguistic and geographical) to current phenomena such as racism, migration and multiculturalism. The MA focuses on the protracted effects of colonialism on European metropolitan cultural and political practices and aims at providing an increased visibility and critical reflection of these dynamics within the academic field at various levels.

 

The scope is to re-direct the rich field of studies on postcoloniality, as based on the Anglo-Saxon model, toward the development of a European based brand of postcolonialism which addresses the specificity of European perspectives by taking into account the different historical legacies of empire (British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Belgian, German, Turkish and Eastern European) and their lingering influence in contemporary Europe. This concerns an update and implementation of the work on racial taxonomies, the studies on the feminisation of migration flows, and the debates around multicultural policies. These must be tuned and applied to specific colonial paradigms which range from Western Europe and the Mediterranean basin to Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. The course will pay specific attention to: Historical variations (Gendering Europe and its legacies of empire); Languages and Identities (representations, boundaries and genres); Multicultural realities (feminisation of migration, race, citizenship and refugees); Artistic output (virtual communities, visual culture and the space of exposure).

 

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The course contains seven clusters with the following headings: