Creating Colonialism: The Literature of Exploitation
and Cultural Contact

St. Lawrence University
The Cultural Encounters Program

John Hunter
Cultural Encounters/ Level 2

Since widespread European exploration began in the late fifteenth century, colonizing nations have been faced with the problem of describing "alien" cultures and places. Choosing from amongst the vast and variegated literature that this situation has generated, this course will chart and analyze the important features of the descriptions and/or re-imaginings of the territories and peoples that came under European (particularly English-speaking European) control, in a historical investigation of the process that we now call colonialism. We will begin by examining the economic motivations of sixteenth century colonial activity, Europe's place in the larger world, and the ways in which existing narratives of inferiority (racial, class-based, and gendered) were adapted to suit the people of the New World. Later sections of this course will consider the romance of the American Frontier, the tragedy of the "noble savage", and the nineteenth century colonization of Africa. We will end by coming full circle, analyzing how colonial stereotypes were eventually turned back onto the European underclasses and how they still survive (and thrive) in present day representations of immigrants and "aliens." This course will be run as a seminar: students will be required to research and present historical/contextual material in oral presentations, write regular journals on the assigned texts, and write two long papers. There will be no final exam.

Primary Texts:

John Hawkins, Martin Frobisher, et. al. Elizabethean Narratives of Exploration
Michael de Montaigne, "Of Cannibals"
Sir Walter Raleigh, Selections from The Discovery of New Guiana
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Aphra Behn, Oronooko: or the Royal Slave
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans
Olaudah Equiano, The Life of Olaudah Equiano
Selections from Native American Testimony
Henry Morton Stanley, Selections from his exploration narratives
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Jack London, People of the Abyss
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: the Wonder of the New World
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Closing of the American Frontier
Proceedings of the Berlin West Africa Conference
Essays by Frederic Jameson, Thomas King, Raymond Williams, and others