This course is a basic introduction to the issues and assumptions of a loose body of literature described as Post-colonial due to those literatures emerging from or in relationship to areas of the world that were once formally colonized by European powers and/or American cultural and political interests. Though focused primarily on twentieth and twenty-first century texts, we will explore the entire history of such literature as complex manifestations of changing power and cultural relationships. We will also explore them as distinct attempts at idiosyncratic style, vision and political possibility I a world where due to colonization and various empires cultures, languages and ideas have become brutally mixed and gloriously mangled. This is a class about our contemporary moment as the fallout of centuries of crisscrossing empires. Authors may include, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, Chinua Achebe, Edwidge Danticat, R.K. Narayan, Wole Soyinka, Pauline Melville, Samuel Selvon or Ama Ata Aidoo.