Thuggery across Literary Space and Time
The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines a thug as “a violent person, especially a criminal.” Merriam-Webster offers synonyms such as “gangster,” “ruffian,” “bully,” “goon.” Interestingly, Merriam-Webster includes “villain” in its list. What do the thug and the villain have in common? What do we really mean when we use the term? How does the term travel through space, time, and genre to generate ideas for contemplating place, race, gender, and personhood from the nineteenth century to the present?
In answering these questions, this course will challenge the received notions of similarity between both terms, on the one hand, and relocate the thug in its mytho-political origin in British-dominated India. Commencing in media res with a brief examination of the thug in popular imagination, the class will zoom out from this popular portrayal of thuggery to track the figure of the thug from nineteenth-century British literature to Indian historical and journalistic accounts of thuggery. We will examine the colonial power structure that determined the meaning of the term and identify the contestations inherent in its use in its origin spaces. Bringing insight from this historical account to our reading of the manifestations of the thug in contemporary African, African American, and Caribbean literature and popular culture (comprising sonic and visual texts), we will generate a more capacious working definition of thuggery that retains its originary implication of the British colonial enterprise and recasts it as a socio-spatial strategy.
Evaluation will include two analytical essays and a final project that requires secondary academic research.