NOTE: Schedule subject to change
As of January 20, 2026
Postcolonial Auto/Mobility
Term 1
TUE & THU, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Since the scholarship on automobility emerged in the field of sociology, its key claims have paid keen attention to the infrastructural networks in which the automobile is embedded. However, sociological examinations have in the same vein given short shrift to the postcolonial. This seminar takes this limitation of the sociological debate on automobility as a point of departure for reading postcolonial automobility in literary and cultural texts. In this course, we will commence from two central claims: the first, the entire world as we know it is postcolonial; and the second, the term “automobility” is a misnomer for what it purports to name. We will start by exploring automobility as a form that we can read across spaces—from Vancouver to New York to Jakarta to Lagos. In doing so, we will consider the term postcolonial and ask ourselves what it means to think of our world as we know it as postcolonial and of ourselves as postcolonial subjects. We shall apply our answers to these questions to rigorous discussions of instances of the automobile in postcolonial texts, with particular attention to Africa. Africa is particularly cogent for this reading because it challenges any simplistic understanding of automobility. Through novels, plays, poetry, and films, we will consider Africa’s automobile network of road, spatiality, coloniality, infrastructure, motor vehicle, and oil and the corollary effects of all this on the artistic imaginations of African cultural producers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In short, this course considers the keyword “automobility” as an entry point to unpacking the connections between literature and infrastructure.
Term 2
WED & FRI, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
The material book: history and networks, 1780s-1890s
This seminar places the material book in the context of its networks of raw materials, with a focus on linen, lead, trees, insects, leather, and bone and their entanglement with histories of emerging capitalism and financial exchange, maritime, riparian, and overland transport, chattel slavery and the traffic in enslaved people, "exploration," extraction, and settlement. Discussions will emphasize the English-language codex of Britain and America and the more expansively defined and/or non-codex books of Nuu-chah-nulth, Lakota, Haudenosaunee, and Cherokee nations/peoples. Assignments will be sequenced, including a theory or history presentation and handout, a research abstract, and an annotated bibliography, building toward the design and completion of individual projects investigating and contextualizing in historical and spatial relations the materials and making of a book (codex or otherwise) or related grouping of books of each student's choice. There will be opportunities for hands-on work with materials in Rare Books and Special Collections and the Museum of Anthropology. There will also be opportunities to gain practical experience in making the material book (binding, ink- and paper-making, letterpress) if seminar members desire.
Readings will include Senchyne, The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Univ of Massachusetts Press, 2020); Barnes and Goodman, American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History (Univ of Pennsylvania Press, 2024); Skeehan, Fabric of Empire: Material and Literary Cultures of the Global Atlantic (Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2020); Wisecup, Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures (Yale Univ Press, 2021) and "Toward a Bibliography of Birch Bark," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 117, no 4 (2023); Duffek, McLennan, and Wilson, Where the Power is: Indigenous Perspectives on Northwest Coast Art (Museum of Anthropology/Figure One, 2021); Marie Battiste, "Print Culture and Decolonizing the University," in Decolonizing the Page (Univ of Toronto Press, 2004); shorter works on specific materials and networks. Historical texts will include James Cook, Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (London, 1784); Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative of the Life (1789); Anna Barbauld, Evenings at Home (1792-96); William Wordsworth, The 1805 Prelude (selected books); Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814); Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897); Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987); Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (1991); others TBA.